THE BIG BALL OF WAX by Shepherd Mead

Now that we're living in the best of all possible worlds, some of you who come after us may want to know how we brought it off. I'm thinking especially of you junior executives at Con Chem, which is why I'm dictating this whole memo-tape. After all, it is you fellows who will have to pick up the torch when we drop it.

It wasn't easy, let me tell you. There was a time just before the Momsday Holidays in 1993 when American business might have taken the wrong fork in the road and gone almost to plain disaster.

But we at Con Chem made the right decision, took the right fork in the road, and here we are today.

Now I know that all of you have heard of the early days of XP, and you are going to expect some mighty spicy material. I hope I won't disappoint you, but you have to realize that in a memo of this type which will be available to the Organization, we have to think of morale and of keeping up the moral fiber, both of which are all important.

So when I come to the places where I had to take part in the well-known orgies, which of course I had to do in line of duty and not through any personal desire, I'll try to be brief and factual.

There is no use lingering over an evening which you spend, say, on a cloth-of-gold couch beside a fountain of sparkling wine with maybe a dozen or so of the most beautiful girls in the world who are wearing no clothing at all, or as little as you desire, and all of them your own personal property for the entire night.

I mean nothing is to be gained from lingering over that kind of thing, especially since nowadays we don't have much more of it, except on certain occasions for certain people. We can certainly prove that it does very little good for business, except in more or less high-level situations where a type of good will is involved. It is definitely not for the general public.

I am glad we're through with all that because we have all certainly found out that business has to be kept on a high moral plane, except in certain situations.

Well, as I started to say, it may be hard for some of us to remember how things were before XP. You might say they were sort of the horse-and-buggy days, to use a figure of speech. It was a simple life, and yet I guess in lots of ways it was a good life.

But there is no doubt that XP changed things, as much I guess as TV did, though there aren't many people still alive who remember what it was like before TV, since that was more than fifty years ago.

Well, why don't we go back to the beginning and roll it all up, as the fellow says, into one big ball of wax. In fact, when I look back on it, I realize that what you might call the Birth of XP all happened in practically less than a week, from Tuesday morning to Sunday night, and they are six days which you can be sure I will remember all my life. That and the Momsday Rebellion a year later are things which I will no doubt tell my grandchildren about, if I ever have any, though as you can understand I will have to cut out some of the juicier-type details.

Why don't we start off, then, with that Tuesday morning, in the spring of 1992, which was pretty much the last carefree morning I had for some time. It will help refresh our minds, too, on how things were back in "the good old days."

I woke up, as usual, to the sound of music. There were violins playing softly. Up ahead I could see the sun rising up over the Canadian Rockies. Little strips of pink clouds were moving past the snowy peaks. Down below was a clear mountain lake, and around it were pine trees, shaking in the wind.

When I listened for it, I could hear it on the aluminum roof. The Canadian Rockies were beginning to fade out, but the sunrise stayed there and out of it came six beautiful girls, two brunettes, two redheads, and two blondes. They kept walking forward until they filled the whole north wall of my bedroom. I rubbed my left eye, which was sticky with sleep, and opened it. The stereo effect jumped the girls into the room and they walked right past my bed. They were singing "Wake up, wake up, you sleepy head!" and wiggling the way the Code said to, right to left and left to right, but not back and forth, which would have been immoral.

I almost decided to put another tape on the alarm, maybe the "Sunrise Over The Grand Canal." The only thing was that the funiculi-funicula music made me bilious before breakfast.

I pushed a button by my bed, which switched the machine from Tape to Broadcast, because as I suppose you have guessed by now, this was all on Video-Tape, which in those days we thought was pretty hot stuff. You could either play your own tapes, which could be bought at any tape store, or you could get the regular TV broadcasts.

When it snapped to Broadcast, I ducked, and as usual at this time, the cigarette which was blown up to the size of a farm silo reached out from the wall to a spot three inches from my nose. I closed my left eye and flattened it out against the wall.

The cigarette faded to a dreamy-eyed girl, bust shot, holding the special Momsday carton, printed in pink and blue. I opened my left eye. "The gift everybody would like for Momsday," she said.

It reminded me that I still had almost all my Momsday shopping to do, my cards to get printed, the lights strung up around the house, and a hundred other things. The spirit of giving was fine and a real shot in the arm for business all right, but I was glad Momsday and Christmas came only once a year each.

I said I just wanted to see the weather forecast. The master of ceremonies changed hats—of which he had at least two dozen—told a joke, and then switched to the cameras in Manhattan, White Plains, and Garden City. It was raining in all three places. A pretty girl dressed in the pink and blue Momsday colors brought out big cards with the temperature, barometric pressure, wind velocity, and a final one that said:

The master of ceremonies changed hats again and said the rain would stop at 10:04 in Manhattan and 10:17 in Garden City. I used to laugh at that because oftentimes in those days they were wrong by more than ten minutes.

"And now on such a fine day," he said, "let's have a fine song." He was using the two-tone talk which some of you may remember, saying the first "fine" down and the second one up, the way I just did. What it meant translated was, "On such a lousy awful day, let's have a fine song." At that time in our history, two-tone talk was really catching on. It was figured out by the video people, and the idea naturally was to make the printed word without inflection completely meaningless, which it just about was by this time anyway.

What the video people would have been surprised to know on that "fine" May morning was that video itself was about to get a stab in the back. And I—as much as anyone I guess—was the one who was going to hold the dagger, though I didn't know it then.

I pressed a button. The sound and picture went off, and the whole wall, built like a vertical Venetian blind—the way practically all walls were in those days if you remember—rotated its louvers so that I could see through the glass wall into the garden. The dogwood trees, Mother's pride and joy, were covered with wet white blossoms, and the azaleas and forsythia were in bloom, too. They all looked a bit faded, the way everything did after the blazing vibra-colors of the television.

I kicked off the covers and raised my legs over my head twelve times. I've never seen any result from all this. I mention it mostly to help recall the healthy Spartan life we led in those days before XP. Not that everybody just lies around now, but you have to admit we do a lot more relaxing. Anyway, in spite of this daily exercise, my abdomen was rapidly getting ahead of my chest and giving me what some people might call a pear-shaped silhouette.

I stood up, sucked in my stomach to prove I really could if I wanted, and then let it down easily to its normal position, where I'm sorry to say it would stay the rest of the day.

Then I stepped firmly into the stainless-steel bathroom and directly into the Bod-ee-Wash, a product of the Hotpoint Division of General Electric. I closed the glass door and a warm spray shot from little nozzles around the walls, followed in five seconds by a gentle froth of pine-scented suds. I closed my eyes for ten seconds until the warm rinse came on.

Ten seconds later I braced myself for the ice-cold spray that hit me from all sides. This, you may recall, was optional, but I always went through it. I stood the ice-cold for the full three and a half seconds, then relaxed as the blowers on all sides began pumping out warm, super-dried pine-scented air. They were joined by the four sun lamps, and in thirty seconds I was dry, tanned, and loaded with Vitamin D.

A pine-scented mist filled the stall. I raised my arms to make sure it would settle where it was needed most. After three seconds I stepped out of the stall guaranteed to smell, for at least twenty-four hours, more like a grove of pines than a human being, or double my money back. This, of course, was good, because after a few hours of exertion on the part of a human, a pine tree smells definitely better.

I flexed my muscles a couple of times in front of the mirror and decided the way I always did that I needed to take more exercise, something I've since neglected to do. Then I placed my chin in the Remington Shave-Magic. Two dozen tiny cutters, pre-set for my facial contours, moved all together over my beard. Though it was nothing like today's modern Shave-Magic, they were even then as gentle as a woman's caress, a phrase Remington used in its advertising, and rightly so.

The whiskers took five seconds, and the Bilt-In Massage ten. I hadn't regretted buying the massage attachment, optional on de luxe models. I always tuned it to the roughest, or MANLY, setting. It slapped you around a bit, but it was worth it. I was debating whether to get the new model which washed your teeth at the same time, when the Lotion Spray, also pine, came on.

I picked up the old rotary toothbrush, and remembered I had to open a new dentifrice refill cylinder. Needless to say, it was our own Con Chem brand, Chem-Dent, which was supposed to stop decay, sweeten the breath, and improve the personality. Some people didn't believe the part about the personality, but we had figures to show that more psychiatrists used it than any other dentifrice. I could feel it improve my personality, and it had a nice minty taste.

I ran a comb through my hair, which was short, and receding pretty rapidly, and stepped into the dressing alcove. This was paneled in walnut-grained plastic and everything was built in, including my new Bendix Wash-o-Robe. The Bendix snapped open as I approached. My suit, shirt, underpants, and socks were just where I had hung them the night before. They had all been flushed with detergent, rinsed, dried, and pine-scented while I slept. I noted that the Miracle Cashlon suit would probably need a new permanent-crease in another month or so. It hadn't had one since November.

I stepped into the knitted underpants and the navy-blue Cashlon socks, zipped on my white oxford Newlon shirt and my gray Cashlon flannel pants, slipped on my laceless shoes, and went out to see Mom.

"Beautiful, Mom," I said. The housecoat clung very closely to her figure which was almost the same as an eighteen-year-old girl's. This wasn't entirely an accident. The amounts of kilowatts that had gone into Mom's figure by way of her electric massage and vibrator machine, her electric horse, steam cabinet, and whatnot, would have lit a medium-sized town for quite a while. Not that I begrudged her the electricity. I know how all of you feel about your moms and I felt the same way and still do. Especially at that time of the year, around Momsday, when our moms are foremost in all our thoughts.

"You look sweet sixteen," I said because I knew she liked that kind of talk. Practically all moms of her age liked to think themselves younger than their sons, a fact which I guess manufacturers like us have encouraged, and I think to their advantage perhaps. Actually you'd have to look twice even today to tell that Mom is over twenty-five except for the color of her hair, which was prematurely gray at thirty. And oftentimes she dyed that brown, to go with certain dresses. Mostly however she liked to keep it tinted a light lavender.

"There's the strangest item. There aren't going to be any more babies in St. Louis."

"They were interviewing an obstetrician just now. He was very nice. Sort of an iron gray. He said there was a grave danger."

"Did he say the birth rate was actually falling?" I hadn't heard that, but I did know that something strange was happening in St. Louis. Most important, for us at Con Chem, was that sales of all kinds were down, a fact we'd been discussing in meetings for several days.

"He said it wasn't showing in the birth rate yet. It's just that advance bookings of maternity rooms in hospitals are dropping off at least fifteen per cent."

"Well, darling, one reason could simply be that people aren't—really, you're over thirty, Lanny, and——"

"Well, the obstetrician didn't say so, but after all, there's this new religion."

"Oh, Molly Blood." I had heard of Molly Blood, the new evangelist, everyone had. "I should think she'd have just the opposite effect." There had been rumors, which Molly's sect denied, that she had been a stripper in Las Vegas. I didn't know how true that was then, but from what I'd seen of Molly on TV, she could have qualified.

I was already more than seventy-five seconds behind schedule, so I hurried over to the dining nook, part of the main living-dining-kitchen room. The whole area except for the kitchen alcove, was paneled in a rich, semi-bleached walnut, actually only about a hundredth of an inch thick, plastic impregnated, bonded to synthetic wallboard, and impervious to fire, water, and abrasions; it was dust repellent and available in all two-bedroom models.

I sat at the dining table, snapped on the television, raised my orange juice to my lips with one hand and put my cup under the coffee spigot with the other. The coffee pre-frozen and heated instantly in the Coffee-Mat, poured out, not too hot, "Jes drinkin' hot!" as the ads said.

"Your eggs are all ready, darling," Mom said. She walked over to the kitchen alcove where the walls and ceiling were covered with plastic in a delicate petit-point pattern, mostly a soft lavender to match her hair.

She put a plate under the Mix-O-Mat which hummed a theme of Tschaikowsky's and squirted out of its nozzle a golden spiral, shaped something like the Tower of Babel and about six inches high. It was the Ham-N-Egg Mix, a product of Aunt Bedelia, Inc., and guaranteed to taste more like ham and eggs than the real thing. It had every vitamin and mineral known to be necessary to human nutrition, plus a few more they weren't completely sure of. In addition it contained enough deodorants to deaden any odors that might be left on me, including, as they said, "any unpleasant residue left by other harsh deodorants," plus chemicillin to heal minor cuts and abrasions.

"I dialed medium-hard, the way you like them," Mom said, as she set them in front of me.

The louvers in front of the picture window closed as the television warmed up. As the picture filled the wall, a commercial was just ending. It was for Lax-O-Mint, one of our competitors, but I had to admit it was done with restraint, and in good taste. Only one short sequence showed the large intestine and that was so highly stylized it looked like a coil of red plush, standing ten feet high in the middle of the living room. The rest of it was a polite drama, played in evening dress. The fellow was handsome and well muscled and wore, besides an expensive dinner jacket, only a very delicately constipated expression.

I looked up from my Ham-N-Eggs and there was Molly Blood, surrounded by a choir of young boys and girls, the boys in black velvet and the girls in cloth-of-gold. The letters L-O-V-E were cut out of glitter letters six feet high just over the kids. Molly sashayed down from the choir to a position that filled the whole screen. She was wearing a white dress, absolutely plain, and absolutely skin tight.

"They say," I remarked, "that you can tell right through the dress whether her pores are open or closed."

The news story was the same, the St. Louis obstetrician's interview, but they'd had time to edit in this tape of Molly Blood. We were tuned to WPIX, and they always tried to keep the news spicy.

"Is there any connection," the announcer asked, "between this news and Molly Blood? Only time will tell!"

"I just can't imagine all this in St. Louis," said Mom, who came from a good St. Louis family. We had lived there, in fact, until after I'd graduated from college. "It just seems out of character. The people in St. Louis are such nice people." It was certainly true that at least the people we knew in St. Louis were very nice, in all senses of the word.

The next item on the TV was the latest crime of passion, which had occurred in one of the garden tenements in Jackson Heights.

"A really nice sight greeted police this morning," said the announcer, using the two-tone reverse. The cameras on location showed the outside of a building, a run-down six-story brick structure dating back to perhaps 1950.

The scene dissolved to a sequence photographed in a scale-modeled set. We could see a bathroom with an old-fashioned tub shower. In the tub was a doll with its arms and legs cut off and lying beside the torso.

"A WPIX telecolor first!" the announcer said. "Police found the body just thirty-seven minutes ago—but our model shop is first to bring you the re-created crime, right to your breakfast tables." There was just a hint of red at the severed joints. I could tell it was all done in excellent taste.

"Yes, isn't it?" I looked at my watch and swallowed the last three or four mouthfuls whole. This you could do safely with Ham-N-Egg Mix, since it had all been pre-masticated and salivated, by Aunt Bedelia, corporately speaking, of course, and by machine. Almost all the breakfast mixes were of the instant-eating, or "Chew If You Like" variety, even in those days. They had backed most of the others off the market, as indeed anything will that saves time for busy people.

I wiped my mouth on a disposable napkin, one of our own Doubledamask Brand, walked back into the bedroom, put on my Cashlon flannel jacket, filled my pockets, and started out.

"You forgot to make the bed, darling," said Mom, who was standing in the doorway. She checked the dial on the Bed-Make-R to make sure it was still "Tucked In, Medium Tight," and pressed the button.

For just a split second I thought of how she used to tuck me in at night when I was a little boy in St, Louis, before Bed-Make-R's were invented. I kissed her on the forehead, and she smiled. Maybe she was thinking the same thing.

"I will." I started toward the living room. "Oh, I almost forgot, Mom," I said, though I really hadn't, I just wanted to save it till last. "I may be a little late tonight. I have a date with Harriet."

"Oh, Lanny," she said, and I thought for a second she was going to cry. "It isn't that I mind your going out with girls, it's just that, well, I don't think Harriet is our kind of people."

Mom always felt that way about all the girls I went out with, though I had to admit that Harriet's family, at least, was very different from the kind of nice people we used to know in St. Louis.

"Yes, dear." She turned away. "I think I'll get something peppy on the television."

I decided right then to be old-fashioned and get her something on Momsday, too. That is if I had enough money left after the business presents, and cards, and everything.

I stepped from the living room into the CarShell, which was a 1992 Buick and had come, of course, with the car. Both the CarShell and the car were plainly dated in large numbers so that you could tell very clearly what year it was. I was glad of it because even then it was getting so that it was the only way you could tell a '92 from the old '91 and '90 models. For the last forty or fifty years the amount of chromium had been increasing until by '90 the only thing not chromium was the license plate. The plainly dated car was the only answer.

The CarShell was working well. It had sudsed and rinsed the car, sprayed it with Johnson's new Glo-Mist, vacuumed the interior, and scented it with pine. It was in the process of opening its own door and the car door, starting the motor, and gently warming the driver's seat.

As I sat behind the wheel, the car door closed softly. I looked at the ammeter to see if the motor were running and could tell by the wagging needle that it was. I backed out of the CarShell and as I did it closed its door and became once more a gleaming half an egg with the letters B-U-I-C-K-1992 on it. The shell for Mom's MG nestled beside it, looking rather low and sporty.

I blew a kiss to Mom, who was standing in the window. She made a pretty picture, framed in the bulbous aluminum of the house.

I hoisted the aerial by push-button to come in more directly on the power beam and couldn't help noticing on the electric meter that I owed Con Edison $176.96. If I didn't pay it before it reached two hundred I'd lose the ten per cent discount.

Since ours was a nice neighborhood, most of the houses were Custom-Bilt, which meant really that they were prefabricated and mass produced. Ours was a Kelvinator, the one next door a Bendix, and down the block were Wear-Evers, GEs—all kinds. The newest one, by the corner, was a ten-room Cadillac Convertible, with sliding walls. I always used to feel a little jealous every time I passed it.

Toward the parkway the neighborhood was a bit rundown, with a sprinkling of old brick and frame houses. The parkway itself was almost bumper-to-bumper on both levels, but I finally angled in behind an old '85 gasoline burner with two date plates, one reading "SATURDAY NIGHT" and the other "2020." College kids. I rather hoped they'd pass that law about fraudulent and facetious date plates. It wasn't a joking matter.

The office in Port Washington was only a few miles from our house in Locust Valley. At my 200 m.p.h. cruising speed I could theoretically make it in a minute or two. Actually, of course, traffic was almost as bad as it is today and I had to allow almost an hour. You could never count on an average of better than 7 m.p.h.

I set the Buick in Traffic-Automatic and turned on the Proximity Beams that would keep me about fifteen feet behind the next car and in the middle of the lane. I sat back to listen to the radio as the car inched ahead smoothly. Stormy days were always the worst because some of the aircraft people were driving, too. I passed several Plymouth-Stinson convertibles in the opposite lane, their rotor blades folded back and dripping.

Actually it was 10:03 and I was already three minutes late when I drove into Katie Park.

I guess all you fellows who have been to Headquarters in Port Washington feel the same bang I do whenever I drive into Katie Park with its woods and landscaped grounds and all. It is rightly called one of the showplaces of American Business.

For those of you young executives who have never been to Headquarters, let me try to paint you a word picture of the way it was on that fateful but wet morning.

You couldn't see any buildings at first, only a line of oak trees on each side of the road and then a forest of birches. Then you could make out the low glass and aluminum offices through the trees.

Needless to say, at Katie Division, standing as you all know for K Division or Headquarters, we don't have any smokestacks or railroad spurs or slag heaps the way we do at some of the chemical and manufacturing plants around the country. What we produced at Katie and still do, thank goodness, wasn't food or soap or fabrics or appliances the way Con Chem's manufacturing plants did, but actually interoffice memo-tapes and holes in IBM cards. And, of course, most important, our main product was really high-level thinking and guidance. It is at Port Washington, just as it used to be at Headquarters in Radio City, that all of Consolidated Chemical is managed.

I drove past the formal gardens and, as usual, got a big bang out of those red and green leafy plants that spelled out our mottoes. There was Con Chem's TRY, TRY! and Katie Division's own WE KAN. It always made me want to get in there and punch.

I pulled into the parking lot that was surrounded by a high lilac hedge, and had to drive to the far end, past hundreds of cars. I could tell just by all the cars how late I was.

I stopped and stuck my stainless steel key into the parking meter. It flashed the information to Personnel that I had arrived, lit an amber light on my secretary's desk, and recorded the date and hour of my arrival on my time card. At Con Chem we always think of everything.

I ducked under a covered walk and headed for the building. Every few steps was a colored poster, most of them stereo, so they really reached out and grabbed you. The one that always got me was just a plain guy with a droopy forelock and kind of a lopsided smile. He had his sleeves rolled up, and over his head was the American flag with the thirteen stripes and sixty-six stars waving in the breeze. Right across his chest it said TRY, TRY! Some of the posters said WE KAN, some of them THINK TOGETHER, and a few said TEAM UP. And I might add here that they are all thoughts that are as good today as they were then.

"Good morning, Katie!" I said. Then, too, we always called the receptionist Katie, no matter what her real name was. She was sort of a symbol. And she was always good looking, at least from the desk up.

"Good morning, Mr. Martin!" I was always impressed at the way she called everybody by name. More than five hundred people used this entrance and she called each one by name. Our Personnel Relations psychologists were really on the ball.

I said okay and went through the other door. It took me past hundreds of desks. As it is even today, K Division's only penalty for being late was the long way around. It was another place where the psychologists really had us, and rightly so.

This whole building was at that time the Sales Division. I walked to our wing, which was Market Research. The first thing I saw were Miss Frappitt's legs. I reminded myself once again that I must break the habit of looking at all women from the bottom up, and wondered why Miss Frappitt's legs, which were skinny and bony, hadn't broken me of it already. I'm sorry to say that even now I lapse into it from time to time.

"Oh, Mr. Martin, Mr. Burry is looking for you, he wants to see you right away," Miss Frappitt said.

"I'll be right with him," I answered, not looking too much at Miss Frappitt. Not that Miss Frappitt was a poor secretary, she wasn't, and I don't criticize the Company for hiring her, but I had to admit that the marvels of modern science had certainly broken down where she was concerned. Her nose had been redesigned, her face had been lifted on several occasions, and she had been massaged, pummeled, electrovibrated, Elizabeth Ardened, vitaminized, deodorized, bowel-regulated, and even Arthur Murrayed, but through it all Miss Frappitt had stayed triumphantly repulsive, with a whining voice, watery eyes, and a face that always seemed to be running down hill.

I went into my office and stepped into the bathroom, strictly a junior-executive type bathroom, just the John and bowl, no Bod-ee-Wash, no sunlamp, nothing. Most of us in those days lived a simple, Spartan life. No frills, such as we're used to today.

I came back to the office, the standard pickled-pine plastic, and only a small sun deck outside, beyond the glass wall. There was a pile of memo-tapes on my desk, but I decided I'd better wander in first to see Ben Burry.

Ben's office was a couple of doors down the hall. I walked into his secretary's anteroom, which was very colonial. I always felt his secretary should be wearing hoop skirts, except that it would have been an awful waste of legs.

"Hello, Regina," I said, trying to keep my eyes up, but without complete success.

I went in. Ben's office was even more colonial than the anteroom. It was all a knotty-pine plastic, with simulated wormholes. Ben was listening to a memo-tape on his memo-tape machine, which was in a case that had been made from an old cobbler's bench.

". . . and except for the situation in St. Louis——" the memo was saying, just as Ben shut it off.

"Hello, Marty," he said. He always called me Marty, which I didn't especially like. It always seemed to me to have a foxy sound, and I'm not the foxy type certainly. I have heard the fellows at the country club refer to me as piglike, in a joking way of course, but never as "foxy."

Ben had a heavy face and shaggy hair and thick stubby fingers that he usually clasped in front of him. I find there are all kinds of successful executives. There are the fast and flashy ones, and there are the deep thinkers. That's what Ben Burry was, a deep thinker, which was the way he got to be assistant vice president in charge of market-research analysis.

At that moment Ben was staring at his fingers. "I see you're from St. Louis," he said.

"I had to get 'em to process the personnel cards. You should have told me, Marty." Ben was a very deep thinker, as I said, like so many market analysis men, and oftentimes he didn't always hear everything you said to him. "How'd you like to go to St. Louis, Marty?"

"We were hoping we could stop the sales trend with extra spot advertising, special deals, two-for-one offers, and all that. But I just saw some new store-check figures today."

"Gets worse every day. Now I ask you, Marty, haven't we given 'em everything they want? Haven't we got guys walkin' around with surveys, not only in St. Louis, but every place all over the whole country, seven days a week? What flavor pudding do they want? What color washing powder? What kinda television programs, what kinda commercials? Is there any single thing we don't check with 'em?"

"We've got it down to a science all right, Ben," I said, and I was weighing my words. I don't think I'm bragging when I say that even in those days we had market research down to a real science, and I refer not only to Con Chem, but to just about every company. Though needless to say we had plenty of special wrinkles of our own. We gave everybody exactly what they wanted, what the largest percentage wanted that is, and if this isn't Democracy I don't know what is.

"All I know is," said Ben, "in St. Louis it doesn't work. And that isn't all. This part really scares you." Ben's voice dropped and I leaned over his desk. "Two weeks ago we sent a special man into the area. Van Cleve."

"We're not sure. The St. Louis office hasn't seen him for a week. I'm just thinking out loud, Marty, but I've got a hunch that maybe the Van Cleve thing is tied up some way with this whole St. Louis problem. And Marty, I hate to say this. I'm a religious man. I'm very active in the Oyster Bay Yourchurch. In fact, I'm on the First Team and my kid plays first base on the softball outfit. I believe that a man's religion is his own business. But Marty, we kinda believe the whole trouble here is—religion."

"Everything points to it. Got another meeting on the subject starting in just a minute. Want you to join us."

I went back and told Miss Frappitt to locate my assistant and have him take my place in the other meeting. He would have to find his assistant to take his place in his meeting, and so on down five or six levels until the meetings reached almost an informal plane, where the regular Rule Book of Procedure and Ritual was sometimes nearly ignored.

I then went directly to Ben's office and into his private meeting room for the pre-meeting meeting. Back in Dad's day the pre-meeting meetings were informal, but self-seekers evidently turned them to their advantage. I was mighty glad they were formal. It kept everything orderly. You knew where you stood.

Six of Ben's own Research Analysis echelon were standing behind their chairs. Chair Five was open, and yet I knew that in this group I was clearly Chair Four. Fred Brack was behind Four. I couldn't help noticing he was wearing a new Cashlon flannel suit with natural shoulders.

"Oh," he said, "thought Wilkers was coming, and he's clearly a Five to my Four. Sorry, old boy."

He moved to Five and I stepped to Four. It was a pretty skillful maneuver, and I saw it wasn't lost on the others. There had been a moment when there was real electricity in the air, but it was past. Jim Connolly in Seven winked at me, but I thought it best not to acknowledge it.

We all looked automatically to Joe Sand behind Chair Two. He began the pledge of allegiance to the flag, and then sounded the pitch pipe for a simple one-chorus singing of the Con Chem Loyalty Song. We all sang:

This was partly because Mr. Frawlingham was dead but we kept it in the song, as we do even to this day. At Con Chem we've always been mighty loyal.

Bill Mitchell in Chair Three stood up and said his standard ceremonial line, "Swear to best my bility speak truth and a whole truth and think always inna bessinnersts Consolla Chemical."

When the Rights had died away, there was the traditional two-beat pause while Chair Two seized his pencil by thumb and forefinger, raised it vertically six inches to the right of his face and said, "Contact!" The meaning of this part of the meeting ritual has always been disputed. One old protocol man told me it dated from a gesture of our former President, D. R. Frawlingham, and that the word had originally been "contacts."

This was the signal for the Chair One man to enter. Ben Burry was right on cue. He opened the door and walked briskly to his chair.

As he approached the table, he smiled at each one of us in numerical order and sang out in cadence, "Hello Joe, hello Bill, hello Marty, hello Fred, hello George, hello Jim, hello Wally." Ben's cadence was distinctly Harvard Business School. The Yale cadence was entirely different; you could spot it a mile off.

"Funniest thing happened to me this morning," Ben began, going into the Opening Humanizing Story, running time in those days 150 seconds or less. "I was just coming out of the bathroom when little Ben comes in and says, 'Daddy, what are you gonna get me for Momsday?' And I said, 'Well, Ben, whatta you want?' " The story went on for another minute or so, and wound up finally, " 'Well,' I said, 'if you're gonna be a Con Chem man when you grow up, you gotta make up your mind!'"

We all laughed, but I had to admit it was kind of lame. However, now that I'm in a position to deliver the Opening Humanizing Stories myself, I realize that it's a real problem. One thing that helps, I might advise all of you, is to study Con Chem's Leadership Pamphlet, which contains nearly a hundred sample stories, some of them easy to change around. If I do say so myself, I sometimes get quite a nice ripple of laughter.

Well, we all got out our pencils. There were large yellow pads in front of every chair, which were intended really for notes. I began with a crisp, neat circle in the upper right-hand corner and started working down and to the left. The others were doing the same thing, though they weren't all drawing circles, of course. Fred Brack always drew boats and Joe Sand did daggers with jeweled handles. If I had a dollar for every circle I have drawn in meetings I would be a multimillionaire, and every one helped to improve my Thinking on the subject at hand.

Bill Mitchell in Chair Three stood up and walked around the table. In those days this was done only in the pre-meeting meeting ritual. One old fellow told me it had started about thirty years ago as a device for collecting notes from members around the table. Now of course it was purely traditional.

"If there is no additional information," Bill said, following the ceremony, "we'll take up the material from the previous meetings. Joe, it's your meeting."

Joe Sand stood up slowly and crackled his handful of bond paper in the traditional Salute-to-the-Meeting. He looked silently from one to the other of us and said, "Gentlemen." He paused. I knew Joe would be good. He was from Princeton, where they had a famous course in The Business Meeting. Not always sound, to be sure, but dramatic.

"Gentlemen," he repeated. "I have here the reports on seven meetings held in the last seventy-two hours. They are all bearing on the situation in St. Louis. The situation is alarming. The first meeting was a preliminary study of the philosophy behind our analysis of the store checks in the St. Louis area. Essentially, the sense of the meeting was that——" Joe paused once more and then, in a gesture that made each of us fairly jump up from our yellow pads, he slapped the first report down on the table. "The sense of it was that—sales are down!" It was a shocking thing to do. Many men would have taken twenty minutes in a summary of that first meeting.

"I think," said Bill, his voice shaking a bit from emotion, "that we should talk to that point for a while. It was apparent before the meeting, at which I presided, that the sales in the St. Louis area were down. The meeting was called to formulate a Combined Brand philosophy——"

"Please, sir," said Joe, interrupting. I could tell that feelings were becoming pretty raw.

"Please, sir, the findings of the meeting number one were substantially reversed in meeting three, and——"

"But," cut in Mitchell, "meeting five reversed the findings of meeting three and essentially restored the position taken in meeting one. Therefore I feel we should talk first to the point of meeting one to establish——"

"We'll talk to the point," said Ben. It was a terrible blow to Joe. I've seen things like this break men. He sat down quivering.

"Well, good," said Bill Mitchell, picking up a fat stack of papers. "Let me review a few of our St. Louis district figures, both from the store audit group and the pantry and bathroom-cabinet checks in our panel homes. Now this first page——"

I drew in a circle and linked it to two others. It was a bit flat on top, but otherwise a fine one. Bill went on reading figures. After ten minutes or so he stopped and turned to me.

I admit now that I was trying to think my way through to some kind of integrated sales philosophy, and I hadn't actually heard all the figures, if any. But I pride myself on never being at a loss for words in a meeting—a piece of advice that is sound even today.

"Well," I said, "I think they're significant. Significant. They show a trend certainly. But do you think we're wise to put too much reliance on these, uh, partial results before we study the over-all picture?"

"I get a lot of nourishment out of that," Ben Burry said, and all the heads nodded.

Bill Mitchell began reading again. I looped another circle and shaded it carefully in a herringbone pattern. My thoughts were falling into line, though I can't remember today exactly what they were.

"Was it a good meeting?" she asked in her whiny voice. She always asked if it had been a good meeting.

"We had lunch in the meeting. They sent in some Hammix sandwiches." We usuallly had Hammix, that being one of our products.

"Okay." That would leave me twenty minutes to finish up the regular day's work. I'd have to hurry. It usually took at least half an hour. Not that we had to do any routine stuff. Order writing and filing and tabulating and bookkeeping and mailing and all that were done even then by the IBM Clerk-O-Mats. These were not as fancy as they are today, but they had their punched cards and electronic brains and tape memories in those days, too.

As I walked past Miss Frappitt's desk I could see my own Clerk-O-Mat, an Executive-Assistant Model B, a really beautiful design in orchid and old rose. It was humming away, its little cards flipping and its colored lights winking on and off.

After all, our job was Thinking, the making of basic decisions, and most of our time was spent keeping our fingers on the pulse, so to speak. The Clerk-O-Mats couldn't really decide, and they certainly couldn't go to meetings. We had them there and they knew it. We in management had seen that very clearly. There were actually more of us than ever and everyone expected the number would increase. I couldn't help thinking of the first company I'd worked for, Pharma-Products, Inc., where the manufacturing process was almost completely automatic, and where we actually had twice as many men in management as we had in the factory. The meetings at Pharma were really works of art, with bits of traditional pantomime and a few old chants that had been handed down almost half a century. And, of course, mighty clear Thinking, too.

On my desk was a stack of memo-tapes—the ten-dollar bill size we used at Con Chem. We had to use a lot of them since it was pretty hard to reach anybody during the day—unless you just happened to be out of meetings at the same time.

I snapped the first one into the Talker, noting as I did the printing that read "Memo from John Lenning" and the typing that read: "To Lanny Martin, RE Meeting of 5-8-92." The Talker said, "Thanks, Lanny, for putting in a word for my plan today. I feel sure that if we ever get the whole thing buttoned up, we'll take off on it. Right? Thanks, boy." That was all.

I took it out of the Talker and felt under the typing. The letters were heavily cut, a pretty clear indication of several carbons. This meant that John had sent copies. To whom? Probably to someone not at the meeting. Why, then? More than likely to make it seem that I was really behind his plan instead of having made an almost noncommittal remark at the meeting. Could it mean his plan was beginning to backfire and he wanted someone to share the blame? Maybe he was even looking for a whipping boy to whom he could shift the whole blame. The more I thought of it the more I thought the thing was loaded.

I mention this incident merely to point out that even at a progressive and fine company like Con Chem we had to be Thinking clearly at all times. Not that we had a really political situation, at least not half as bad as most companies.

I decided in this case to have Frappitt try to find out from Lenning's secretary who had received copies of the memo, and then do a reply to the same list, thanking John but making it very clear that——

The chime on the Vid rang and I flipped it on. In those days the Vid wasn't quite as refined as it is today, but we did have color and life-size. The screen across my desk lit up and there was Ben Burry, shot from the desk blotter up, looking at me.

He was sitting there drumming his stubby fingers on the desk. "Look, Marty, you better skip this meeting."

I tried to look in his eyes, and then back at the camera lens to make it look as though I were looking him in the eye. The Vid always gave you a shifty-eyed look.

"I just talked to Ferguson." He was the vice president in charge of our whole division. "He wants you to be in St. Louis tomorrow morning."

"Don't you think that's a little hasty? Our whole sales philosophy is completely undeveloped, and——"

"Well——" I hardly knew what to say. I'd assumed it would take at least two weeks of meetings to button everything up philosophy-wise, and for the whole team to get its sights on just what we were shooting at.

"He wants a first-hand report. Probably a number of meetings will be based on your findings."

"Oh, well, then." It did begin to seem more orderly. We all know what a real danger it is to short-circuit the actual Thinking processes.

"See to your transportation. I'd recommend the ten o'clock plane from Kennedy. Should get you to St. Louis by eleven ten."

"Okay," I said. He gave the short Vid waving-gesture which I answered as he clicked off.

It was getting dark when I stopped in front of Harriet's house. Perhaps it would be a good thing to explain here that the following is more on the personal side and those who wish to skip it may go on to the next spool of tape which I will begin at the place where my plane arrives in St. Louis.

However, it seems to me worth while for historical interest if nothing else to tell what I did on that last night before I came face to face with XP, and because it will give you some idea of the way typical people reacted toward TV, which in those days of course was our major selling vehicle.

Well, as I started to say, when I stopped in front of Harriet's house, it was getting dark and the constellation PEPSI COLA was beginning to rise in the east the way it had since I was a boy and does, of course, to this day. Back then the bright star whose name escapes me used to dot the "i" on Momsday Eve, the way it was planned, instead of coming over the "o" like it does today, due to slipping.

I got a bang every time I saw it, and still do today. It kind of adds to the dignity of man. I have always wished Con Chem could get one perhaps for one of our washday or food-mix products, but, as we all know, the cost of satellites has gone up out of all reason largely due to the Teamsters Union demands. Nobody has put one up since CHICLETS began its pole-to-pole orbit more than fourteen years ago. At the moment, in front of Harriet's house, CHICLETS was out of sight anyway, probably on the other side of the world.

Up and down the street there were other houses just like Harriet's, though in the last forty years or so the owners had done all they could to make them different. The thing you noticed most at the moment were the Momsday lights which were of all types, but there were also different kinds of porches and shutters and plantings and all. The only Momsday lights Harriet's house had were just a small pink-and-blue neon bouquet.

I pushed the Hiya-Bell, an especially snappy one with a bright plastic Hiya frame all around the button, a girl with her skirts blowing, saying "Hiya" in a balloon like in a book. As I pushed it, of course it said "Hiya, kid!" from the loop of magnetic wire, though in this case it was sort of worn and sounded more like "Hi-a-keh." The girl lit up, too, and inside you could hear the other wire recording:

I mention this just to show that in practically a slum neighborhood like this there were even then plenty of examples of a higher standard of living.

I heard the scuff-scuff of bedroom slippers, and then Harriet's Mom came to the door. I had to get used to Harriet's Mom every time because we came from such a nice family in St. Louis and she was sort of different. I didn't even dare to tell my mother about Mrs. Halpern.

I might add at this point that Halpern wasn't the actual name; in fact, even "Harriet" is made up. It is the only name in the memo, however, which is not the real one, and this is for reasons which I guess will be clear later.

Well, Mrs. Halpern had dyed burnt-orange hair frizzled out in all directions, and she was wearing green Newlon lounging pajamas loose enough so that her great big sagging breasts kind of flopped around. There was a burnt-orange monogram, edged in purple, just about over her navel, and a peek-a-boo place over her hips where her skin kind of bulged out.

"Hello, Lanny-boy," she said. She always called me Lanny-boy, which made me feel like I was getting a brisk rubdown with maple syrup. "Harrie's getting dressed up for you, Lanny-boy, whyuncha siddown an' make yourself comfy, huh?"

" 'Mommy Halpern,' " I said, and I wondered if Harriet's legs were really worth it.

All the furniture was grouped around a blank wall. Mrs. Halpern steered me to a double chaise lounge that was done in a plastic with a red-and-white zebra-skin design.

"I'm gonna sit in my kidney chair," she said. She plumped down in a lavender armchair and pushed a button. It swiveled like a drawbridge and shot her feet up in the air, higher than her head.

"It's the latest model," she said, "simply grand for your kidneys. Scientific tests made by the manufacturer prove they don't really perk till they're pointed sort of up." She had told me this three times before, but I always preteneded it was news.

"I just had to have it," she said, "as soon as we got the new air conditioning and the stainless-steel bathroom all paid for, to say nothing of the set of 1992 Mix-O-Mats, all brand new."

"Well, since we're strictly temporary in this house, Lanny-boy, we oughta make it nice, until Daddy gets relocated and we can move into a place like I'm used to. I know my Mom always said to me, 'Lily,' she said, 'to think that you, a Woodburn, brought up like you were, should live like that!' "

As far as I could tell, the house had been strictly temporary since Harriet was two years old.

She pushed another button. The TV controls were all built into the arm of the kidney chair. I could tell it was an '89 Philco Lif-Syz Stereo-Color. They'd probably picked it up rebuilt for $100 down and three years to pay.

The blank wall filled with color and we heard screams and gunshots. A detective serial was ending an episode and a man in a slouch hat and a trenchcoat—he was the detective—was sloshing around in a pool of blood with a young lady who looked absolutely naked even though she was actually fully clothed on account of the broadcasters' code. It was probably the way they fitted her into the clothes.

The pool of blood snapped to a shot of a young lady swinging from a beam by a rope around her ankles. She was being horsewhipped. You just saw the shadow, and the camera shot was very artistic. I couldn't help thinking how wonderful the technicians were getting. In fact, not a month went by when there wasn't some very real technical development in TV. It was Progress, all right. Over the screams and the snapping of the whip they began sneaking in some music, which segued into the theme for the chewing-gum jingle. It meant they were coming to the end.

"We made it in time," said Mommy Halpern, dialing down the sound. A man was holding up a package of chewing gum and moving his lips, but we couldn't hear what he was saying. She meant we were in time for "Blow a Million," the big quiz show that had a jackpot of one million dollars.

"I gotta feeling," she said, "that this is my night. Last night I dreamed I was gonna win the million."

I heard a step in the hall. It was Harriet. Starting at the bottom I saw her tiny little size-four spike-heeled pumps, and going on up, fine, thin ankles, beautiful calves, dimpled knees and nice, delicately rounded thighs. I guess Harriet had the prettiest legs in the world, except for maybe a few girls on television. And besides that she had a nice personality.

"You look beautiful," I said. She had on a Newlon date dress, sheer black with lace. You could see right through it to the lace bra and panties. "Shall we run along?"

On the wall I could see the title "Blow a Million" zoom up and then glitter, all solid gold.

We sat down on the double chaise longue. Harriet smiled. Her teeth were slightly irregular.

Mommy Halpern turned up the sound, right in the middle of what the announcer was saying about Joylies. On the screen his head was four feet high, and if you looked him right in the eye you couldn't look away. You had kind of a trancey feeling that made you believe everything he said. I had heard he was one of the highest paid announcers in the business.

"Joylies," he was saying, "contain no nicotine, no irritants, no harmful tobacco, just a pure scientific blend of sheer ecstasy."

I could hardly help pulling out my pack of Joylies, in the familiar gold-and-silver package. I offered them to Harriet and her mother, who each took one. I had to admit I never got any ecstasy out of them, but they did help prevent cavities, and they were something to do with your hands. Practically everybody smoked Joylies.

"I never had the feeling so strong," said Mommy Halpern. "Tonight we're gonna win the million."

"I once knew somebody," I said, "who worked in the same company with somebody who was called up on the jackpot question."

"You have to think of the odds. With two hundred and fifty million people, and more than a hundred million TV sets——"

They were already acting out the first question, with a dancing chorus of fifty, twenty singers, and a sixty-piece orchestra, to say nothing of a series of tableaux. The dancers were chopping wood and freeing the slaves.

The program drew a name and called somebody on the Vid. Then on the screen you could see the person answering. It was in color, of course, but flat, because the Vid didn't have stereo yet, the way it does today. The person who answered was a housewife in Oklahoma City. She was wearing Newlon pajamas exactly like Mommy Halpern's, except that hers were yellow and the monogram was different.

Lots of people did dress for television, because almost every night there was some kind of audience-participation show. It was a big thing for the clothing business.

The housewife in Oklahoma City hesitated a minute, started to say "Roosevelt," and then, after looking off desperately to her right, said, "Abraham Lincoln."

It wasn't the jackpot question, so she only won ten thousand dollars and a year's supply of Joylies. It was a nice prize, even though the only thing you could buy in those days with a dollar was a pack of chewing gum. Now, of course, a pack costs two dollars.

There were nine more questions and then came the million-dollar jackpot. I had to admit I was getting excited myself. Harriet was holding my hand tightly, and Mrs. Halpern had almost stopped breathing. She kept looking over to the Vid, which was in one corner. You could hardly see it because of the big Vid-Chair in front of it. It had a huge back, shaped like the tail of a peacock, covered with a pink-and-orchid flowered chintz-plastic, "to make a lovely background for your Vid picture," as the ads said. But everybody knew that if your Vid-Chair was big enough people couldn't see beyond it, and that saved a lot of room straightening.

"And now for the Joylie Jackpot!" the announcer said, giving another Joylie commercial. After all, this was the moment of the biggest audience. Then he spun a big hamper which looked like a giant pack of Joylies, and pulled out a name and Vid number.

Mrs. Halpern sighed and slumped back again to rest her kidneys. "It'll be next week, sure. I got a feeling."

The lady in Fresno, who also was wearing Newlon pajamas, and who had a big Vid-Chair colored red, missed the question. Most people did. They only had to give away the jackpot about twice a year.

"And now," the announcer said, "how did you folks like the show? All you lovely people with survey buttons push once for 'fine,' twice for 'fine,' and three times for 'fine.' " He did the two-tone talk inflection so well that there was no question he meant "not very well" by the first one, "so-so" by the second, and "very well indeed," by the third. Mrs. Halpern pressed her survey button three times.

"I'll always give 'em a three-push on this show," she said, "because I wanta keep it on."

The millions of buttons all over the country sent in an electronic impulse that was registered by the central computer machines. It was an absolutely foolproof system for giving everybody just what they wanted. Nothing that more than two-thirds of the people didn't like ever stayed on for more than a week, thank goodness. It guaranteed us real socko entertainment, and the kind of ad messages that really pulled their weight. Weak stuff and other types of high-brow programs didn't slip through for long. It kept the program boys on their toes.

"You children go," she said. "I'm going to play baseball." She meant she was going to play Participation Baseball, the TV baseball game that was backing the real major-league stuff right off the push-button ratings. I wish I'd thought of it. The man who did was a multimillionaire, even after taxes. It took real genius, because it just used the regular survey-button system and let everybody, right at home, really play the game. Besides that, you got real high-voltage emotion.

Mrs. Halpern switched the channel and we saw the actor who played the part of the young pitcher talking to his poor old mother, who everybody knew was slowly going blind. "I'm gonna win for you, Mom," the pitcher said. And his Mom said, "Try, son, try. It's all the present I want for Momsday."

That part was just a tape-recorded flashback, because the game was on. The picture did a slow kind of watery dissolve to a shot of the pitcher on the mound, and this was real live action, being played right on the shooting stage.

"The count is three and two," the announcer said. "He's winding up for the pitch—now all you participants in New York and Philadelphia—ready, get set—will it be a ball or a strike? One push for a ball, two for a strike—PUSH BUTTONS!"

Mrs. Halpern pushed twice, and waited. Her fingers were digging into the arm of the kidney chair.

"He's throwing it—and it's a—it's a—I'm watching the computer, it's coming over now! The 'ball' count from Philadelphia is very high, I think it's gonna beat the 'strikes' from New York—yes, it does, folks, it's a ball and he walks!"

"It's all done by the electronic brain, Mommy Halpern," I said. "It allows for the population differences in New York and Philadelphia, makes slight allowances for weather and other audience differential factors in the two cities, and also adds a cumulative score in favor of the losing team."

"Probably not. They don't see the same dramatic tapes we do, it's cut in differently in Philadelphia. There they probably saw the batter having a talk with his poor Momless little boy. It helps to build team loyalty."

Harriet handed me her beautiful silver-blu Newlon-mink stole and I threw it over her shoulders. It would have taken a microscope to tell it wasn't the best mutation mink, yet it was one hundred per cent synthetic Newlon fiber and you could toss it right into the washing machine.

"Well, hello!" I said, leaning over and kissing her. She let me do it full on the lips and with her mouth slightly open—but for just exactly seven seconds. Then she wriggled away in a gesture which was not exactly unfriendly, but seemed almost a trifle bored. You could always count out the seven seconds: one-and, two-and, three-and, like that, which is what I guess Harriet did.

In fact, before my experience with XP I often had problems with girls, though Harriet's seven-second routine was something I had never come up against before.

However it was quite clear Harriet wanted to encourage me up to a point. "Hello, Lanny, darling," she said, smiling with her slightly irregular teeth. She swung one leg in a slow arc and let it rub gently against mine. She certainly knew my weakness, a weakness which I must admit still exists, in spite of my efforts to overcome it.

"This is the new version. It's a Scent-ey. They put a little scent tube in every car. You can smell the horses."

"It's sort of Hollywood's last ditch. They feel this is something television can't do."

"It's the story that counts," said Harriet. "Get a good story and you don't have to smell it."

"Lanny, darling, she hasn't got it, she's one of the Muscular Dystrophy people, I mean it's her career, or it was. She's had the nastiest luck. She's worked like a dog for the last seven years, toadying to the top Muscular Dystrophy brass—and some of them are really horrid—just to get somewhere in the organization. They'd really sold the idea, you know—an endowment of billions, forty-two network hours promised them every year—all those lovely buildings, and Dystrophy Park, and——"

"Oh, I know, it's a big operation." It was, too. Some of the diseases were almost as big as General Motors.

"Oh, yes." I remembered something at a meeting, and something else from one of the telenews programs. "Guggenheims or something, wasn't it?"

"Makes Muscular Dystrophy no worse than a bad cold. Mabel could tell those Guggenheim people a thing or two. Probably some scrubby little fellow in a laboratory. Well, now no one will give a cent to Mabel's people, and they've just had to cut down, including Mabel."

"It isn't as easy as you think. The Cerebral Palsy people are definitely jumpy, they're terribly afraid their own thing is going to be poofed, too. There's hardly a one that's really healthy any more. She said to me, 'Harriet, maybe there's some room with you people.' Well, Lanny, you know how things are with us."

"Okay, let's call Mabel," I said. Harriet was a social worker and I was anxious to leave the topic quickly. It always turned into an attack on me, somehow. I picked the phone from the dashboard and handed it to her. She voice-dialed Mabel, speaking the numbers clearly to the dial-tone.

"You know," she went on, after dialing, "we're having to lay off people—and right at a time when they need us most."

"Maybe she's not home." When Harriet said "you people" she meant the corporations. I could never get her to appreciate what a fine job we were doing. She could never appreciate that we had developed the most scientific system of market surveys in the history of civilization.

"Darling, you're simply just a mass of rating buttons and questionnaires. You're entirely too permissive."

"We just give everybody what he wants," I said. The phone was still ringing and I hoped it would keep right on.

"That's exactly what I mean by permissive. You simply can't give people what they want. You've got to tell them what they want."

"Darling, haven't you ever heard of social engineering? It can all be reduced to a very exact science. You simply have people who are trained to tell people what they want. After all, people like me have given up our lives to it. We know very well what's good for people."

There were car-high partitions between the stalls in the drive-in theater. The picture industry had found out years ago that people didn't come just for the 200-foot Wrap-Around screen with third-dimensional peripheral vision. People wanted privacy, too.

The attendant hooked on the little scent-tube, attached the speaker, and tiptoed away. It was only the coming attractions, so the smell hadn't started yet.

I tripped the seat lever to tilt us to a reclining position. Our heads were just high enough so we could see the screen. Harriet tossed off her Newlon mink and snuggled in close beside me. I could feel the warmth of her skin through the sheer black dress. She touched me all down the right side.

Then we began to smell horses and when we looked up we saw Porthos, Aramis, and those other fellows riding into the screen credits.

"I don't think this is going to catch on," I said, bending over Harriet. It seemed almost that I was making love to a Shetland pony.

But she raised her lips to mine and gave me a burning kiss for exactly seven seconds. Then she pulled away, just far enough.

I could tell that by the time I got home I'd probably feel, as I so often did, like a stick of dynamite with a lit fuse. At least I was happy to be able to keep in the spirit of Con Chem's Pep Talks, as given to us so often by the company psychologists. In fact, between the hoof beats I couldn't help singing to myself our little Company Psych jingle:

And now and then I thought of our motto: "Think of Katie—First!" Needless to say, I cannot claim any real personal credit for my self-control that evening, but there was no doubt I would be sharp the next morning, and it was a mighty good thing I was, too.

When the stewardess took away my breakfast tray we were still more than twenty-five minutes out of St. Louis.

"Is there anything more you'd like?" she asked. Her eyes were bulging at me slightly, probably because she was wearing contact lenses.

"Well——" I began. I was a little bored, and I'd already watched each one of the little animated signs around the cabin of the plane. The one for Joylies was especially clever, with little cartoon kids running around blowing smoke rings.

I hadn't really read anything since the last time I'd been to the dentist several months before.

"Well, why not?" I liked the idea of reading, and we had several books at home. "What do you have?"

She brought me a beauty called The Case of the Disemboweled Virgin. The pictures were fine, posed with really luscious models, and with very good depth and roundness. I started to read the speech balloons.

On the second page I came to a wonderful thing which I guessed was the main reason this one got to be a bestseller. There was a little cardboard lever at the side of the page. It made the killer's arm go back and forth. You could just push it up and down and he'd stab the girl with his dagger every time.

After a couple of pages, though, the letters in the speaking balloon started to dance in front of my eyes. I just couldn't seem to keep my attention on the story. Reading was a lot of work.

I thumbed through the ads—there must have been a hundred of them in this book—until I heard the loudspeaker say, "Fasten your seat belts, please."

As the helicopter airport connection limousine came down over Clayton I could see the air-terminal building. It was a big four-sided Budweiser sign, and on each side three-dimensional draft horses fifty feet high were pulling a beer truck. Every now and then they'd fade off and a man would drink a fifty-foot glass of beer.

As we settled down on the roof I started for the door. The 'copter hostess was standing next to me.

"Watch your step then." She moved toward the door. I figured she was probably talking about the Molly Blood thing, and, of course, it turned out that she was.

Harry Felker, our St. Louis district sales manager, was waiting beside the landing spot. He ran up to me as soon as I stepped out.

"Good to hold yours," I said. I knew Harry pretty well from the Vid, but this was the first time we'd actually met. Harry was a tall blond fellow with a kind of pointed face, one of our really top men. I looked at him very closely to see if he still had that kind of eager bird-dog look that always labels a good sales executive. For a while there, just to judge by the Vid, I thought he'd lost it. Now it seemed to be coming back.

"Yeah, nothing like it." We could market research all we wanted, but these guys in sales were the real shock troops. I had a lot of respect for Harry.

A man was walking onto a landing spot, right under a helicopter that was coming down. Just before the landing gear hit his head I could see the man's expression. He looked like a guy walking through a field of buttercups. The 'copter pilot roared his motor and went up. One second more and the fellow would have been smashed.

"You gotta lot to learn, Lanny-boy. Didn't you see the button? He's a Follower. And there's another one."

Standing in the crowd was a middle-aged gentleman with a slightly washed-out look and a faraway smile. He didn't seem bothered by the excitement. On his lapel was a big red heart-shaped button and on it was printed:

"It's the symbol, kid." He reached into his pocket and took out a button just like it. "I can talk about it now, Lanny-boy. I'm an E-F-A."

"An E-F-A. Ex-Follower-Anonymous. I'm okay, absolutely okay. I can leave it alone, as long as I don't go near it at all. It almost got me, though."

"In the early stages just the E-F-A's can tell. It's in the eyes, mostly. Damned dangerous, though. Just as likely to forget he's driving."

"Teevee?" the driver asked, before he even found out where we were going. He flipped the switch and the screen in front of us lit up in full color. It usually cost an extra dollar or so a ride, but when you were alone it was sure worth it.

"Never mind," said Harry. The driver switched it off. "You wanta go right to the office?"

I tried to concentrate on what I was saying, though some of the little light-up signs in the cab were mighty clever and kept kinda winking at me. The one for the Clayton Statler Hotel was a nifty. It was a good thing I was already going there. The girl bell-hop just winked at you and said, "You'll be happy here!" but not at all suggestive, of course. It was low enough so you could just talk over it, and you couldn't turn it off. For a subtle captive audience job it was a honey.

He turned that swell salesman's grin on me and said, "Can't fool you, can I, Lanny-boy?"

"Shouldn't have tried it. I was tryin' to cover for Van. Look, play ball with me for a few days, will you? I'm still hopin' he'll snap out of it."

The pedestrian, who had missed being run down by no more than six inches, turned and smiled at us. He was wearing a heart-shaped button, just like the others.

"Goddam Followers," the driver said. "Sorry I hadda stop like that, Mac, but I'da killed the guy."

"No. He knows that I'm an E-F-A. He'd think I was coming after him. It's strictly against our policy. They have to come to us. We hope he will, in time."

I dropped Harry at the office and told the cabbie to go down to the Bison Hotel.

As we left Clayton, which had become the business center of the metropolitan area, and went east into old St. Louis, the neighborhood became poorer and more industrial. If it hadn't been for the big bright signs and the Momsday decorations, everything would have looked mighty dingy.

"Sure." We started through Forest Park, which was still beautiful, though the garden tenements crowded around it closely. The poor devils who lived in them probably scraped along on less than $100,000 a year, and probably had just one car, and that one two or three years old.

We left the park at Kingshighway and drove on east. Even since I had left St. Louis this part of town had gone down still more. There were some old private places down here that used to be shut off by big iron gates. In fact, I had an old aunt who used to live in one of these houses. Now, though, the iron gates were rusty and broken-down and the big mansions were probably boarding houses.

Just beyond one of these old private blocks I saw a crowd of people being held back by a police line.

The driver started laughing. "That's a good one, Mac, that's the best one I heard today. A fire, he says, a fire."

The cabby turned around and looked at me. "You a big kidder, Mac, or you new around here?"

"That's Molly Blood's Temple down that block, Mac. They gotta hold back the Followers to keep 'em from breakin' down the doors."

"But look, it's Wednesday morning, ten thirty-five. They don't have services now, do they?"

"Not till eleven. Some of them people they been there all night. Now they got six shows a day, seven days a week. Pardon me, Mac, services. They just put on the midnight run. Some guy said they was putting in a nine a.m., too, for the early trade and another late-late job at about two a.m. They sure are spreadin' the good word."

"I ain't the religious type, Mac. Me, I go for the ball games. The old lady likes the push-button ones, me I like the straight ones, so we got two teevees, one in the bedroom. Just the same, I'm gonna take a peek at the Temple next Monday when the Cards got an open date. A guy I know says he can get me in. Just for a laugh."

Two blocks from the police line he turned and we stopped in front of the Bison Hotel. An aluminum front had been stuck on it a few years before and it was beginning to look dented and was coming loose in a few places from the old yellow brick.

I gave the cabbie a couple of twenty-dollar bills and went in. The lobby was very old-fashioned, with some of those old mobiles hanging from the ceiling, all very beat-up with the paint flaking off. There was a quaint old abstract painting on the wall, one of those pictures they used to have that don't mean anything.

A skinny gray-haired old lady made a scuff-scuff noise up to the desk and said, "There's no rooms open and I don't know when there will be."

She looked up at the old electric clock. "I guess he's up there. He don't generally go out till the eleven o'clock one. Three-sixteen."

As I turned and went up the stairs I could hear her mumbling, "I tried to get it fixed, can't even get a repairman. Damned Followers!"

Perhaps it would be morally helpful to all of you, before I show you what J. B. Van Cleve had sunk to, if I point out that he was formerly one of the top management of Con Chem, in charge of trouble-shooting in the whole Missouri-Illinois-Kansas District. It can be a good lesson to us all, what can happen when we let our moral fibers slide, and fail to keep on the ball.

Well, I knocked on the door of three-sixteen and for a while nothing happened. Then the door opened slowly and Van stood there. He was in his undershirt and he had shaving cream on his face.

"Hello, Lanny," he said, just standing there and looking right through me, as though he wasn't focusing his eyes on me at all.

"First time I ever shaved with a blade. Hocked my Shave-Magic yesterday. Only got two hundred bucks. Paid a thousand."

"Why don't you wire New York for money?" I knew Van was at least a half-million a year man. He'd certainly be able to get money.

I followed him without being asked. The room was small, with one window looking out on an air shaft. It was all furnished in the old square-box mid-twentieth-century style with peeling veneer. Clothes were scattered around as though they'd been tossed from the center of the room. A shirt was draped over a wall lamp and a pair of pants was hanging across the dresser mirror. A big poster was thumb-tacked to the wall. It was of Molly Blood wearing a skintight white dress and sitting on a huge red heart with the inscription

on it. Her legs were crossed, and I had to admit they were at least as shapely as Harriet's, perhaps more so.

Van wandered into the bathroom, which wasn't really a separate room, just one of those white porcelain Add-A-Baths, a little larger than a Vid booth, with a shower, bowl, and toilet in it.

What Van needed was a real pep talk and I am the last one to shirk a duty of that kind.

"Listen, Van old boy," I said, "you've got to get hold of yourself. Con Chem is counting on you."

"Even gave up smoking, kiddo. I got religion. Wash in the blood of the lamb, palsy. Put a nickel on the drum."

I hope in the following conversation I won't offend any Episcopalians or any good Yourchurch members, or the followers of any other religion, which is not my intention. I am merely trying to sum up the conversation in Van Cleve's own words as closely as I can remember them, and as irreverent as they often seemed to me. And as I was to discover later, by knowing other Followers personally, Van didn't exactly mean to be irreverent, either.

"Van, boy," I said, "level with me. You're in real trouble. We've got to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. We've got to hit that line and hit it hard. And we need you to carry the ball."

"On Wisconsin, on, Wisconsin!" he began singing. I joined him. "On, Wisconsin!" I sang, even though I'd only been to Wisconsin once, and then only in the southern part of the state. I figured he was trying to grab back the ball and run, and I wanted to help.

He poked his head around the wall again. Most of the shaving soap was scraped off, and the blood was still trickling down his cheek.

"We're gonna get all dressed up nice and we're gonna hop in a cab and go out to Clayton."

He was out of the bathroom, the blood still dripping. I went in and tore off a piece of Doubledamask Toily Tissue, thinking of their very catchy jingle as I did so, and wiped his face and stuck a bit over the nick.

"You oughta be in great shape soul-wise, Van," I said, "the way you been hittin' it lately."

"Oh." Finally he turned away. "Sure, a deal. Tell you what. You go out with me to the eleven o'clock service. Be over by twelve forty-five. Then we'll go to Clayton." He stopped and hummed the waltz, staring ahead right through me. "If you still want to."

At the time I couldn't conceive of not wanting to carry on mission-wise, so I guess my jaw dropped.

"Well," he went on, "it's what you came to St. Louis to find out about, isn't it?"

I had to admit to myself that this was the case. "Okay, why not?" I said. I figured there wasn't anything I could lose. I didn't realize at the time that this is exactly what everyone thought. There wasn't anything you could lose except your moral fibers, which are certainly all-important.

I noticed that Van had lost quite a bit of weight, and at least on the outside looked better than ever.

"That's for the general admission. I've got a reserved seat. We'll get you one, too. They cost a hundred bucks, but they're worth it, boy."

As we came closer to the Temple, Van seemed to be coming out of his trance. He was trembling with eagerness.

"Nope, not here, palsy. The only point in a reserved seat is, you don't have to wait."

Van turned around and looked at me. "You know, palsy, lotsa times Molly isn't even there. Especially the early services."

"Are you trying to tell me, Van," I said, thinking of the skin-tight dress, "that Molly Blood is there in spirit?"

"I can see, Lanny-boy, that you are a scoffer, a man of little faith. This, pal, is a mystical experience."

Van used to be something of a ladder. I watched his face to see if I could spot any sign that this was a joke.

"Palsy, we don't joke about these things. This is something that springs up inside of you."

"It's the biggest thing in religion since Mohammed," he said. "Today St. Louis. Tomorrow—the world!"

We were almost up to the police lines. Ahead, down the block, was a big low square building, covering almost an acre. On top of it was a neon sign with the symbol——

He pulled out his wallet, and opened it to show a pass. It was red and white and had the heart symbol on it. The policeman seemed to recognize it and it looked as though we were going through.

He ducked through the crowd, pulling me. Two men tackled me from behind. Van let go and was gone through the crowd.

"Harry!" I said. It was Harry Felker, and his pointed face was looking up at me.

"Me? I'm an Episcopalian!" I was, too. Not that I went every Sunday, but in St. Louis as a young fellow I was even on the basketball team.

"That's why we hurried over. We figured Van Cleve would try this. It's an old Follower trick. We were going to wait outside the Bison, but we got loused up in a traffic jam. Let's all go back to Clayton, huh?"

The way they sounded, it was all very permissive, but Harry had my right arm locked in a vise, and Jonesy had the left.

"Okay, let's go," I said, just as though I had a choice, which I certainly did not.

I will skip over an account of that afternoon at the Clayton office, which was spent largely going over sales figures for the St. Louis district. To those of you who have a real interest, and I hope many of you have, you can check back into the sales files.

Let me sum up the figures briefly by saying they really left plenty to be desired. Marriages in the area were off about twenty-five per cent already, for reasons which I guess will be obvious later, and we all know what this means to sales of homes, appliances, furniture and all, to name only a few. One thing which puzzled me at the time was that cosmetics, women's clothing, and beauty parlor receipts were up slightly. This checked with the fact that only three per cent of the Followers were women. I asked Harry why.

"They don't seem to get the same comfort out of it," he said. I realize now that that was kind of an understatement.

Well, Harry and I had dinner in Clayton, and then we got in his car. The lights were on by this time in all the stores, and there was that feeling of real Momsday shopping excitement.

"Yeah, a beauty." They had a giant Whistler's "Mother" in pink-and-blue neon, maybe fifty feet high. It really rocked back and forth. The whole thing gave me a real thrill. I didn't mean just the feeling a merchandising man gets when he sees people going into stores, but more than that. I guess it was just the heartwarming Momsday spirit that comes but once a year.

We drove out past the business section and out west to the residential area. Many of the homes already had their Momsday lights up, most of them just the traditional bouquet in pink-and-blue neon, though some of them had Whistlers, and others had almost the whole house outlined in neon.

"I don't guarantee this will be productive," said Harry, "but it's one base we ought to cover."

"Let's face it, Harry," I said, trying to get to the heart of the problem, which is typical of my methods. "We're just talking around the outside of the thing. What we gotta do is talk to the situation. What Port Washington wants to know is—why? Why is marriage off? Why have the Followers stopped buying? Let's find out where that line is and hit it!"

"Gosh, that sure sounds familiar, Lanny-boy, sounds just like me in the early days of this thing. Grab ahold of it, I figured, get right in there and fight!"

"The point I'm tryin' to make, Lanny-boy, is really two points. One is, this is something you can't grab ahold of, not in the regular way. This is a religious thing with a special religious angle, and you gotta adopt a sort of religious feeling."

I knew Harry was taking me out to his own Yourchurch, and I knew he was a member of the First Team there. And I also knew there is very little about religion that anybody can teach to an Episcopalian, which I think I mentioned before that I was.

"Don't get me wrong, Lanny-boy. I'm not talkin' personality-wise. And you didn't give me a chance to get to point number two, which is that there is another angle to this, in addition to the spiritual side. This Yourchurch we're going to just happened to have a big part in developing this whole thing."

I had to admit it was a nice set-up. There was a tall white steeple with the standard Yourchurch sign on top:

It was in the standard golden neon and flashed on and off, first just the Y-C, then FOR YOU AND ME, then it all went black and all of it flashed on at once. Below that on the steeple was a really top-quality Momsday display. It had a Mom in pink-and-blue neon, and it not only rocked back and forth, but the Mom's head kind of bobbed separately. It was very realistic.

The building itself was arena-shaped, like almost all Yourchurches. I had to admit this was a practical idea since you didn't have to build two buildings, one for the services and the other for the parish house and the basketball games and all. There was sort of an office-building annex, too.

"That's our Praisegod Machine," Harry said, "an exclusive Yourchurch development. Actual recordings of the entire congregation. They're doing some real fine hymns and some specially-written Praisegod talk. We had a top script man do it up for us, brought him in from New York. Money was no object. And then Lanny-boy, get this. We had the whole thing multiple-recorded, every single voice is multiplied fifty times. And whatta we do? We play it all the time, twenty-four hours a day. The statistics on it are pretty wonderful. Actually praise-wise we figure forty-eight hours of this equals the entire congregation singing away every Sunday for fifteen years!"

This proves once again my point that a little joke, in good taste at the right time, always helps in a business relationship.

"But all kidding aside," said Harry, "this thing saves us one hell of a lot of time which otherwise might be wasted just singing hymns, and all that. We can sure use it, boy, building up the moral fibers and making contacts, all of which are mighty important in our sensible straight-thinking Yourchurch policy."

GIRLS' SOFTBALL TONITE VIOLETSvs.KIRKWOOD
DOUBLE-HEADER DISH NITE
FRI-SAT SALOME'S MAN MON NITE BEANO

"The Violets are our team," Harry said. "Last year they were Missouri Valley Y-C Conference Champs. They really oughta kick the buh-jesus outa Kirkwood tonight. My kid Kerry is goin' out for shortstop next year."

Harry showed a pass to the girl at the change window and we walked past the turnstiles and into the lobby. I had to admit it was done in pretty swell taste but yet not stuffy. You could probably describe it best as a nice combination of hep and holy. All around the sides were Gothic windows maybe thirty feet high and in each one, rear-projected, was a Coming Attraction, all done up very cleverly to look kind of like a stained-glass window, only gutsier. On the FRI-SAT one there was a really socko picture of Salome in a pose like she was doing a kind of bump and grind with the head right there on the platter and SALOME'S MAN in big glitter letters.

"Believe it or not, it all comes from the central booking office in little slides. The different Y-Cs can fit 'em to any size rear-projection window. We figure we gotta get the new ones in movement, though, especially now with the Molly Blood competition."

All around the walls were pinball machines, about thirty of them. They were all built in, sort of Gothic, and they blended in fine with the big windows.

"We got all kinds," said Harry, "Old Testament, New Testament, and a few just plain Inspiration types. You'd be surprised, they practically pay for the joint."

At least a dozen of the machines were in use, so I could see they were doing a nice job sales-wise. You could see the lights flashing all over.

"Why doncha go over and kill a couple of bucks, Lanny-boy, while I phone up Will."

Harry went to a House Vid, and I wandered over to one of the machines, an Old Testament. There was a gum machine right next to it and since I saw it had Con Chem gum in it, I dropped a copper quarter in and got a stick. Then I plunked a brass dollar into the pinball machine slot. A dozen balls came out.

I snapped the plunger and sent the first ball shooting up the incline. It hit Samson, Delilah, David, Absalom, and the Queen of Sheba for a score of ten thousand. After six more balls I had seventy-two thousand, and the wall in front of me looked like the Aurora Borealis.

Harry was finished with the Vid. By the time he got over to me I had shot all twelve balls and the whole thing was lit up. It was playing a recording of the "Hallelujah Chorus."

"What he said!" Harry looked at the other players and a couple of them laughed. A card slid out. On one side were the Ten Commandments and on the other a picture of David in a kind of sexy pose with Bathsheba.

"It wouldn't be legal for real money to come out, Lanny-boy," said Harry. He held the card up to the light and whistled. "Forty bucks!" he said.

The lights in the machine went off, the record stopped, and the other players went away, shaking their heads. An elevator opened and a man came walking out. He was wearing a nice Cashlon tweed suit and a shirt with a low-cut minister's collar. He was about forty, with receding blond hair and a face that looked as though he had scrubbed it with a brush, though he probably hadn't. It was very pink and clean.

"Hi, Will. This is Lanny Martin, Friendly Will Stannard, Lanny. He runs the joint."

We said hi. I guess I don't have to tell any of you that Friendly is what the Yourchurches use the way some people use Rev. or Reverend.

"Know what, Will? Lanny here just hit the jackpot on the O-T machine, and he never touched it before!"

"I won't lie to you, boy," said Will. "We're twenty-two per cent under the same week last year."

"Worst part is, it gets tougher every week. Oh, we have our moments. I figure Salome's Man is gonna have a nice gross. According to Variety it's been doing top B.O. over the whole Y-C circuit. It wowed 'em in Philly. But how many tapes like that do we get? They're just not puttin' out the stories they used to."

"I got good news for you, Will. Con Chem sent Lanny out here all the way from New York to sorta trouble-shoot this thing."

"Sales-wise, if it hurts business, it hurts Con Chem," I said. "Our stuff goes into everything."

"Whatta you know. I used to be a merchandising guy myself before I took up Yourchurch work."

Will swung around to one of the big Gothic windows. It was one of the permanent ones and it had a picture of a fellow in a gray flannel suit and a collar like Will's, and he had an angel on each side, sort of like assistant vice presidents. He had a crew cut and a big smile.

"There he is," said Will, "our Founder, the late Right Friendly Harry Wilker Murray. He was a merchandising man and a good one."

"Right," said Will. "A real top merchandising man. Well, sir, one day the Big Idea just sort of appeared to him. He was sitting in church one Sunday and the place was practically empty. In fact, there weren't even enough people around to make any contacts—you know, bulling around on the front steps and all after the service. He said to himself, "What the U.S.A. needs is a new religion which will get people up off their tails and into church.' So what'd he do?" Will looked at me, hard.

"I'd run a survey. I'd test the color and the package, and give 'em what most of the people wanted."

"Well," said Will, "he surveyed the tail off of it, and he found that religion was still in the horse-and-buggy stage. People were hungry for real Comfort, they were hungry for God, boy, but nobody had ever put him in the right package. In your lingo and mine, Lanny, it was a job of damn good package design and marketing know-how. And sales-wise it took off like a goosed rabbit."

"Bless you, sister," he said, and turned back to me. "Like a goosed rabbit. Come on in." He led the way into the main auditorium. It was arena-style, something like a football bowl with a roof. The seats were filling up. Down on the floor were a lot of girls in violet uniforms. One of them was knocking flies into the outfield. The outfielders were throwing the balls back to the infield, and the infielders were tossing them around the bases in a very nice hipper-dipper. I could tell it was a good outfit, plenty of snap.

"Look up there," said Will, motioning to the roof, as high as a circus tent, with a lot of wires and pulleys and gadgets hanging from it. "The giant screen lets down from there. Four-sided. The whole installation is mass-produced to fit all Yourchurches. Must be five thousand of 'em grindin' away right now."

I thought of the punchy ads they had for Salome's Man. "That's where you run the Bible Story tapes, huh?"

"That's not the half of it. Sure, we run the story tapes in the evening and on matinees in the afternoon. But we also use the big screen for the regular services. This was Murray's stroke of genius. 'Why have some small-time two-bit preacher?' he asked himself. 'Why not a real high-priced hotshot in every church?' Know what the guy who preached here last Sunday got?"

"Forty thousand bucks for one shot—and worth it. Because the same guy was in five thousand other churches on the same tape, which you don't have to have a slide rule to see works out to eight bucks a church, the price of a ham sandwich! Okay, huh? And we can re-use the tapes again if we want. 'Course the guy doesn't make the whole forty thousand, he's gotta pay a script writer outa that."

"Gee, maybe I could do one of those sermons," I said, knowing that I have always been a pretty good guy on my feet, as some of you who have been to our sales meetings can testify.

"Central Casting's always looking for new material to test," Will said. "Most of it is shot on the Coast. But let me tell you, they'll survey the hell out of you first. They'll give you a script that's been title-tested and then pre-tested on a voice-recording. Then they'll test you against twenty other guys doing the same script, they'll run 'em before test panels and get a like and dislike rating on every thirty seconds. Baby, what comes outa that mill is a real solid product and pretty damned sure to make the yokels sit up."

"Yeah," said Harry, "last Sunday's was a good one all right. 'Is There Enough Sex in Your Marriage?' "

"What did he decide?" I had to admit it was sure a catchy title. It would have tempted me.

"Oh, he didn't, not really, but it was a damned good handle to get into the basic religious side of marriage."

"Some of these boys," said Will, "have built up pretty big fan clubs. And right now we're testing out a double-feature with a dame, to soup up the male figures."

"One church in a test market," said Harry, "is trying out divided audiences—one side men and the other side women, with a different tape for each side."

"The results look mighty promising," said Will. "The only hitch is makin' 'em sit away from each other. We gotta face the fact that there's a certain element which comes to church for a little well-bred smooching, or at least playing footsie while the lights are off. Cut out that crowd and you'll see a healthy slice go off your B.O."

"The whole operation is top merchandising," said Will. "It isn't any accident that attendance-wise we're practically the number one religion in the U.S.A., and on a yearly increase percentage basis we're making monkeys outa everybody."

"Give the people what they want, kiddo," said Harry, "and they'll beat down your door."

I couldn't help wondering at that point what it was that they had down at Molly Blood's Temple. If they could cut into a really basic-thinking outfit like this, they had to be good.

"Where we're really tops," said Will, "is fund raising, which, let's face it, is the main business operation of any church. Make a flop outa that one and you're a dead pigeon. Do we operate like some kinda local merchant, with handbills or something? No. We got a fund-raising subsidiary which handles the campaign for the whole operation, nation-wide. This outfit has working for it the top ad agency in the business, and they turn out the stuff, not just the publicity tapes which hardly a day goes by don't get into one of the TV newsreels, but also the TV commercials and programs of our own."

"But one of our biggest fund-getters is what we call the door-to-door tape. We get out these video-tapes, complete stories see, prepared by the ad agency, running about twenty-five minutes. You can put 'em right on your machine at home. One of our door-to-door guys rings the bell and brings it right in. They are real tear-jerkers, and the point is the good work done by the Yourchurch and what would happen, we imply, if it went broke. When the tape is over the whole family is practically up to their hips in Kleenex and it's at this point that our door-to-door guy whips out his pen and gets their names on the dotted line. The actual results we get fund-wise you wouldn't believe."

"Well, it keeps the stockholders happy," said Will, "and after all that's what we're in business for." Another old lady went by and he tossed her a "Bless you, sister," too, very sincere. The old lady looked plenty happy. Will was sure doing a nice job, all right. I figured he was good enough to make a District Manager out of.

They took me downstairs to a big room with dining tables. Each table seated about ten people, and they were arranged almost like a theater so that everybody could see the speaker's table. You could tell it was for the speaker because there was a reading stand and a P.A. microphone in the middle.

"This is just about the most important place in the whole building," said Harry, "especially to a business man."

"Why do lots of business men join a church?" asked Will. "I'll tell you why. Contacts. Well, sir, our Founder didn't let that one slip. 'Cause we use this room for all kindsa church suppers and ladies' auxiliary lunches and all that, but the big thing is the Wednesday Lunch Meeting. It's got the Rotary and all the other business lunch crowds backed off the map. Practically every business man that counts in the whole Clayton area comes here every Wednesday, and plenty of 'em aren't even Yourchurch members."

"But plenty of 'em will be," said Harry. "It starts off a lotta families. And talk about contacts, boy I could hardly run my business without the Wednesday Lunches."

Will led us to the elevator and we went up several stories. When we got off I could look out the window and see the dome of the arena with all its skylights lit.

Will turned to me with what you might call a very religious but businesslike look on his face. "We got our quiet, spiritual side, too, Lanny. Harry Murray really had his finger on the pulse, and he knew there's a very definite consumer demand for comfort, and I don't mean the easy-on-the-tail foam rubber type, I mean deep on the inside. Here is a real spiritual market, where the demand is one hell of a sight bigger than the supply, so it's just common horse sense we should milk it.

"You take the ordinary garden variety church. How do they face up to it, huh? Some local guy tries to ad lib it, that's how. Some young kid gets herself laid, say, and she's gonna have a baby. She's got a problem, huh? She needs comfort with a capital C, right?

"Well, she's come to the right place when she planks her five bucks into the Yourchurch slot. Comfort-wise we figure we've got any church in the business licked two to one. So, to get back to this kid, what does she do? She just hops in the elevator and goes in to that door."

"And it can't be legal or medical," said Will. "That'd louse us up with the doctors and lawyers."

We were inside the clubroom, though I could hardly say it looked clubby. There were three little alcoves, and in each one was a girl with a sympathetic expression and an IBM machine. One of them was talking to a woman who looked like a housewife. She was sniffling into a handkerchief, and the IBM girl was punching keys.

"If you haven't got any heartaches of your own," said Harry, "just ad lib her a problem and get a demonstration."

"Okay," I said, and sat down in front of one of the girls. She was a blonde with a longish nose and eyes that I had to admit were very comforting.

"We're here to help you," she said, the way a Vid operator says a line she has to say all day. But nice, I mean. "First you must help us. We need to know all the facts——"

"Well," I said, figuring I'd give her a real shocker as long as I was making it up, "I'm in love with my mother."

She spun a rotating file and unsnapped a card. She read the top line and said, "How old were you when you began to masturbate?" She said it just the way the Vid operator would say, "Sorry, your party doesn't answer."

She asked a whole lot of questions like that, and for each answer she punched a key.

"That will be all," she said. She snapped a lever, punched a button that rang a little bell, and handed me an IBM card. It had my name typed on it and a lot of little holes. I wondered which hole said that I loved my mother.

"Just go through that door, please, and go into any one of the comfort rooms. Thank you. Next Troubled One please."

As soon as I got up from the chair, a man sat down. He had a facial tic and a worried expression.

We went through the door that said "COMFORT ROOMS." There was a page boy at a desk. He was wearing a uniform with the Yourchurch insignia on it. It looked very much like the ones the page boys used to wear in the NBC telecenter in Garden City.

I gave him the card and he slipped it into a machine on the desk. It started buzzing.

There were about a dozen doors, each one with a letter on it. We went into the one marked C. It had a reclining chair, almost a couch, in front of a screen.

"Just to show you we think of everything," said Will, "that music happened to survey out as the most comforting of all the three hundred tested."

"They got your tape," said Will. "When they put the card into the machine it automatically selects the right tape out of our library of more than ten thousand."

"Of course," said Harry, "they're all prints. Every Yourchurch has got the same library. That's how we can do it with the best talent and still show a profit to the stockholders."

The camera started to move in through a Gothic window, all in full-color stereoptics. It was a very tricky dissolve to a beautiful study with stained glass windows all around.

The only person you saw was a nice old lady with white hair. I wasn't sure, but I thought I remembered her from television. She looked a lot like the poor old mother of the Brooklyn shortstop, in the participation games.

I was sure when I heard her talk that she was the mother of the shortstop. It certainly proved they used the best talent, all right.

"You needn't worry," she said, "you're going to have your baby and everything will be just fine."

I had to admit it was kind of an unusual solution to my problem, even though the old lady couldn't have been nicer.

Will came running back in. "It's okay," he said, "they just got the card in upside down."

The sound and picture suddenly snapped off and the comforting music came on again.

"Never mind," I said, "I get the idea. I can see how it could be as comforting as hell."

Will turned to me as we walked out past the page boy and said, "I guess you can see how we got everybody licked comfort-wise, huh?"

"Coming from you, Lanny, that means a hell of a lot," Will said. "Come on up to my office now and we'll get down to brass tacks."

We walked up a flight of stairs to the very top of the building. Will's office was up there, something like a penthouse. There were big panes of glass, and you could see all the way to Forest Park.

"By golly," I said, "with a set-up like this I don't see how they can lick you."

"That's why I wanted Will to give you the whole picture, Lanny, so you could see that we're not lyin' down. It gives you a better idea what we're up against."

They both looked very serious, and I could see that Will's hands were shaking a little.

"What Will is tryin' to say is that here in this very church we're probably responsible for starting the whole Molly Blood thing."

"I don't say it wouldn't have started without us," said Will, "but it might not have had a religious angle."

"In a nutshell," said Will, "we were tryin' to get under their skins. I kept asking myself, 'How deep are we goin' with our stuff? Is it really hitting 'em in the guts?' "

"We weren't satisfied. I figured that the guy who could really send you would have this religion thing by the tail."

"You take out in India. They can send a guy so hard he can walk over a fire and not feel it. This is really something."

"I just wanted 'em to have a real knock-out religious experience. Only—get this—I wanted to get it on tape or something so we'd have a real gimmick to merchandise."

"You can see," said Harry, "what kinda vision Will has got. He's practically a mystic, only in a very modern way."

"I guess," said Will, "you might refer to me as a mechanical mystic with a merchandising slant. Anyhow, it sure got me into one hell of a lot of trouble. I started out by looking for a guy who could figure out this gimmick. It took me a couple of years just to find the guy. He was working on something very close to it already, in fact he got his start at the Rockefeller Foundation, and then switched outa there because he had this thing by the tail and wanted to go after it by himself.

"I hauled him out of a laboratory in his own basement in Muskegon, Michigan and gave him a real fine set-up in a swell shop under the arena. For a whole year he flubbed around down there and every time I asked him what was cooking he said it was coming along. But nothing you could hang your hat on.

"Then one day he said he needed another million bucks. 'What for?' I asked him. 'For wires and tubes and a lot of things you wouldn't understand,' he said. Well, the long and short of it was that I couldn't get hold of the money and he walked out.

"The next thing I heard he was tied up with Jed Simmons and Molly Blood. Where Jed and Molly got the dough I couldn't guess because they were just doing some sort of a tent-show revival. Maybe they borrowed it. They were definitely small time."

"But he must have got the gimmick working," said Harry. "He got something working."

"I don't know where he got it," said Harry. "I don't even know if he does it with electricity. All I know is, you just sit down, and—boinnnng!"

"You won't buy him now for any million bucks," said Harry. "I bet they take in that much every couple of nights."

"At least," said Will. "And they've got special experiences that sell for more than a thousand bucks a throw. Or so I hear, at least." It seemed to me he added that last part kind of fast.

"It won't do any good," said Will. "I don't think he even controls it now. His name is Daniel Packer. He isn't even listed in the Vid book any more."

"I just wanted you to know the background," said Will. "But it won't do any good for us to sit around blamin' ourselves. What we've gotta do, both for Con Chem and for Yourchurch is—figure a way to lick this thing."

We sat around for quite a while thinking, but the only solution we could come to was that we'd just have to start selling and sell harder than we ever sold before.

It seemed to me that I just had to locate Dan Packer, for the good of Con Chem, just to talk to him if nothing else. And all in all, it was a good thing I did, because that sort of started the ball rolling and it hasn't stopped yet, not even today.

Finding him was easy, I just called the credit bureau, where practically everybody was listed, including Dan Packer. He lived in a room in an old house in University City, north of Delmar.

The landlady, who had dyed brown hair and an absentminded expression, said that nobody could see him before eleven, and at the time it was only ten-thirty.

"Tell him it's important," I said. "My name is Martin, from Consolidated Chemical Corporation. It's business."

It was kind of a split-level house and the door was up half a flight of stairs. I went up.

I knocked. There was no answer. There wasn't even a sound of movement, or any other kind of sound. The landlady was watching me. I knocked again.

"I used to think he was watching television with the sound off. Except that he doesn't have a television in there. You'll pardon me, the 'Open Hearts' is starting. You might as well come in and watch."

We went into the living room. The landlady had a chair just like Mrs. Halpern's, only it was a different color plastic. She pressed a button and it shot her feet up.

"I'll bet," I said, sitting down in an armchair and putting my feet up on the hassock.

The commercial was almost over. It was for one of our own products, Co-Chem, the amazing new washday product that got everything so white it practically blinded you. It even made things glow a little in the dark, as I guess all of you know.

The landlady had her handkerchief all ready, because the "Open Hearts" really did pull at your heartstrings, as we said in our promotion. We proved a long time ago that your rating in the daytime was in pretty direct proportion to the amount of real sock emotion, and this was just about the top show on the air during the day. Some people could hardly stand it.

A couple of the other shows on the air had families come into the studio, but we found you could get even more sock by going right to the houses. The first one on this show was a family where the little boy was dying of a disease there wasn't any cure for, and they were giving him his Momsday presents because he probably wouldn't live til Momsday.

I could see that the landlady was crying already, and it was only the first guest family. I might add that it's experiences like this in direct contact with the audience in their own home that point up to any advertiser the real dollar value of a medium. To get back to the program, the family that won the push-button poll of viewers as the one they'd open their hearts for would get fifty thousand dollars. If they didn't win they'd get a year's supply of Co-Chem, something which always comes in handy, so they'd come out ahead either way. And naturally with that kind of money in the kitty we could be sure that the families would really stand up on their hind legs and pitch.

By eleven o'clock the landlady was pretty broken up, and I admit I had a few tears in my eyes myself. She pushed her button for the little boy with the disease, and sure enough, his family won.

I went upstairs then and knocked on the door. There was a pause. I heard a sound like the closing of a suitcase and the turning of a Venetian blind. Then the door opened, and it was Dan Packer.

He was tall, with dark, thinning hair, and horn-rimmed glasses. Behind the glasses his eyeball protruded slightly. His figure seemed to be pretty trim, and he had a good tan. He wore a sweat shirt, old corduroy pants, and moccasins.

The room was sunny and pleasant, with a large window hung with an open Venetian blind. Outside in the back yard a flowering peach was in bloom and a sycamore was budding. There was old maple furniture, several bookcases with old-fashioned written-books, an ancient maple Morris chair with matching hassock, and one almost new reclining chair made of aluminum and canvas and padded apparently with foam rubber.

It didn't look broken, but I noticed there were some odd holes and clamps up by the head. I sat in the Morris chair and he sat on the bed.

"Well," I said, "I heard all about you from Will Stannard over at the Yourchurch."

"There's no percentage in beating around," I said. "I'm from Consolidated Chemical—from headquarters in New York. This may be your chance to get into the really big time."

"Of course I can't make any definite deal yet, but I'd kinda like to sound you out so I can find out what your thinking is, and take it back with me; then we can get our heads together later."

Naturally I figured he was trying to beat up the price. "I can't name actual numbers," I said, "but there's a chance it could get into pretty big blue chips—if the thing is as good as I hear, and if you got a good clear title to the rights and all."

"I mean it isn't impossible that we could get to talking numbers like, uh, five million or even, well, ten million."

"Or maybe even more. And you could figure it capital gains. You might be absolutely in clover the rest of your life."

When I heard that I figured it was the silliest question anybody ever asked. Of course now I know it wasn't silly at all. "Well, what do you like?" I asked him. "Women? You could have twenty. Horses? Yachts? Travel? A banquet every meal? Anything!"

I looked around the dinky little room. There was a jar of vitamin concentrate, a sunlamp, and some boxes of food mix, cheap ones at that. I figured he was touched.

"Well," I said, "you could build a huge laboratory and invent a thousand other things."

"I'm sure," he said, "that there will be other patents taken out, but for all practical purposes mine is the last invention. The last of any consequence. There really isn't any need for another."

A teen-age colored boy wearing a plaid shirt walked in. "Hello, Mr. Packer," he said. "I got a new one for you." He handed Packer a square, flat, pocket-size cardboard box.

Freddie went out. Packer slipped the box into a shelf in the bookcase. The whole shelf contained packages just like it, and so did two other shelves. There must have been several hundred of them. I'd have thought they were tape recordings except that they were too narrow for videotapes, and too wide for sound tapes.

I got up. "It was sure nice to get your thinking on the whole pitch, Mr. Packer."

"If you really want to make a deal, go down to the Temple and see Jed Simmons. He's the one that holds the contract anyway."

"But I can tell you right now, you won't get to first base. You'll forgive me, won't you? I can never resist a new one."

Well, it seemed to me at this point I had to try the thing out, even at personal risk to myself, something I've always been willing to take a chance on for Con Chem.

I finally got hold of Van Cleve that afternoon by leaving a message at the desk at his old hotel. We made a date to go to the Temple together that evening.

At about six p.m., I was just getting out of the Bod-ee-Wash when the door buzzer sounded. I slipped into my Newlon robe and opened it. A bellboy handed me an envelope.

I found a couple of brass dollars on the Wash-o-Robe cabinet, flipped them to him, and closed the door. In the envelope was a flat memo-tape, paper money size. I snapped it into my portable.

"How do you do, Mr. Martin?" it said. The voice was a woman's, rather young I thought, and clear and educated. "If you're really interested in making a purchase, I'll be down in the lobby sitting under the clock wearing a hat with a blue feather. 'Bye."

Naturally I dressed rather quickly. I am not going to pretend I thought this had anything to do with the Molly Blood situation, because I did not. But as we all know, it is the duty of a business man to keep his fingers on the pulse, and that is what I thought I was doing. And I think we should all remember that I was unmarried at the time, and in a more or less strange city, at least away from home.

The girl with the blue feather was there, all right, wearing a standard black lace date dress, since it was after six. However, she wasn't really what I had expected, being in the frame of mind I was. She was over thirty-five, not much more than five feet tall, and wiry. The way she moved, sort of quick and darting, reminded me of a squirrel.

"Oh, hello, you're Mr. Martin, aren't you? It just occurred to me that you might have got the, well, wrong impression, but it doesn't matter really since that is something we can take care of rather easily." She said all that in one breath, rapid-fire, and naturally I would have been confused even if she had said it slowly. Actually nobody could have understood her meaning unless they understood the nature of XP and of course at that time I didn't.

"I know you visited Dan Packer," she said, "don't ask me how, but I do, he didn't tell me." Anybody could have told her that, and as I found out later it was the landlady, who picked up a few extra bucks keeping track of Packer's visitors.

"Well, my name is Margie Schroeder and you might say I represent the Molly Blood organization since I'm on the payroll. I do public relations for them, though they don't seem to need much of that these days, they get more publicity than they need, it's more a job of keeping certain things out, really, which is a switch for me after beating my brains out for years trying to get things on TV. Well, the point is, and I must make it very clear that I am not now strictly representing the organization but am speaking only for myself, the point is, if you're interested in the Gimmick, just say so and maybe things can be wangled, maybe. Are you free tonight?"

I thought of Van Cleve and remembered what he had said when we made the date: "Of course I'd like to have you go over with me, Lanny, but you have to remember that once you're really there you can't possibly be with anyone."

"Fine, fine. I can't have you going with me, but I'll give you all the directions and we'll expect you at seven-thirty. Better grab a bite first. Not very many people like my husband's cooking."

I left a message for Van and went to a Mix-O-Mat to have a bite. It was very pleasant. St. Louis was playing Milwaukee in a twi-night participation baseball game, and the restaurant had an enormous screen. I watched three innings, including a fine dramatic bit between the first baseman and his epileptic half-brother. The push-button was located very handily right between the salt and pepper, and I like to think that my push was the deciding one in a very close decision at second.

The food wasn't bad either. I had Lamb-Choplet, one of General Mills' best, though it was cooked a trifle too rare.

I found a cab and at seven-twenty-nine we were rolling into Parkview, an ancient residential area on the city line between old St. Louis and University City. The streets were all curved in a maze pattern, the trees were big and old, and the landscape shrubbery was overgrown and jungle-like. A few of the old houses had been torn down and replaced with new pre-fabs, but most of them were very old. The Schroeder house was red brick with a large front porch and red tile roof.

Mrs. Schroeder met me at the door. The inside of the house was filled with smoke.

I followed her into the room that once must have been the living room. Here the smoke was thickest, but I could tell that the room was almost completely bare, no rug, no drapes, no real furniture. There were strips of white canvas across the windows, and a few stools and cushions grouped around a coffee table.

"Is he a painter?" I asked, because I could see un-framed canvases propped up along the walls, but there were also big chunks of rock standing around on pedestals.

"He's the greatest writer in the world," she said, in the same way you might say, "He's a plumber." I mean, just matter-of-factly.

I could make out through the smoke that a figure was leaning over an open fire which was burning in the fireplace at the far end of the studio.

"What program does he write for?" I asked. I was pretty impressed because I knew that some of the TV writers made very good money, even though some of them were not the kind of people you might like to introduce to your family.

"Please!" she said. "Don't let him hear you say a thing like that! He's a writer. He writes books—written-books."

"Written-books?" I asked. I, like so many of you, probably read several written-books in college. It was part of the freshman English course and they gave over a number of weeks to it, before we got into the visual aid classes on Merchandising, Distribution, and all the serious stuff.

Anybody knew it was almost impossible to keep your mind on a written-book, I mean a real written-book with absolutely nothing but printed words. It's hard enough to keep your mind on television now that we've made the big step to XP.

We walked up to the fireplace. As we reached him he turned around. I jumped. His head was shaved absolutely smooth and he had a full beard, light blond. He was wearing a yellowish T-shirt and a kind of knee-length skirt.

I said "How-do-you-do," but he just looked at me for a moment and then said, "Hail." He turned back to the fireplace and cranked a sort of iron spit. It seemed to have on it a dripping joint of a dead animal.

I decided the best thing was to look away. All this and the smoke too was almost too much for my stomach.

"He makes all his own clothes on that spinning wheel." She pointed to one that was sitting a few feet from the fireplace. "He cooks all his meat over the open fire. He eats it with boiled unpolished rice and uncooked vegetables."

It was getting dark so Ben snapped on a bare fluorescent tube that hung from the ceiling. It made the studio look like an empty warehouse that was partly on fire.

"Ben works here all day," she said. "He's writing the greatest book ever written. He's been working on it for fourteen years."

"It all takes place in one second of consciousness," she said. "And that in itself wouldn't be too difficult, except that Ben has set himself the task of burying in each chapter the names of all the counties in southwest Missouri."

"And it's further complicated by the fact that Ben decided English wasn't quite right for it."

"Sibilant moments," he said, "must be written in sibilants, and guttural moments must be written in gutturals."

At the risk of being thought stupid I asked, "What is a guttural moment?" I didn't know what a sibilant moment was, either, but you had to begin somewhere.

"That's not very nice, Ben," she said, and I guessed I should have felt insulted, though actually I didn't. "The point is that he's had to invent a language, too, and that does take time."

Through the smoke I could see a woman walking toward us. She seemed to have come in through the outside door, but she hadn't knocked or rung bells or anything.

"Hello, darlings," she said, taking off the top of her dress so that her breasts were quite bare. They were pretty good breasts, but smallish, and nothing to be as proud of as all that.

"You'll get used to them in a moment," Letty said, "and they'll be just like elbows."

"Letty did this one," Mrs. Schroeder said, pointing to one of the big rocks on a pedestal. "She's a sculptor."

I couldn't see that anything had been done to the rock, but I said, "It's very nice."

"You're just being polite," said Letty, sort of swinging back and forth, you might say, as she talked. "You can't see them at all from here."

"It's inside," said Mrs. Schroeder, "inside the stone. The meaning is all in the concavity."

Letty lifted off a piece of the rock and I could see there was a hole inside, a sort of a shaped hole. "It's a fine hole, all right," I said. "How can you see the whole shape of it, all at once?"

"We'll leave you two," Mrs. Schroeder said. "Mr. Martin and I have to talk business."

"You have to remember," she said, "that they're artists, and some of them are really very talented, like Ben. A generation or so ago he'd have been a famous writer, but now of course there aren't any famous writers."

I knew that wasn't true, but I didn't say anything. I happened to know a couple of very famous writers, not intimately, but I'd met them over at the agency. Why, some of them made two or three million a year and it was really very easy work. They just had to study the figures of the last week's push-button tabulation to find out how much everybody liked any part of the show. Then they punched up the weak parts and made the good parts even better. There wasn't much guesswork about it, it was a regular science. One fellow, who was a whiz at figures, wrote three shows a week with really top ratings. I know he made thirty thousand a week on just one of them alone, because it was our show and I had a look at the billing sheets.

"More and more," she went on in that rapid-fire way, "they've been writing and painting just for their friends, which keeps them happy as long as they have somebody like me to bring in the money. Or unless they've got a block of U.S. Steel like Letty has from her grandfather."

"I don't guess it costs much to keep Mr. Schroeder," I said, "with his poverty and all."

"Well, he does stay close to home, but his poverty is terribly expensive. Why, one of his meals with real meat and that unpolished rice that you have to send hundreds of miles for, and those special vegetables that have to be grown in organic fertilizer, well it costs about ten times what my meals cost, and as for those T-shirts that he spins out of cotton, well the raw cotton itself that we have to buy specially costs three times as much as a whole new Absorblon T-shirt in the store, and with the repairs on the spinning wheel and the knitting needles and all, well, it's quite an item. I guess there isn't anything more complicated than real simplicity."

The basement had an old-fashioned oil burner and laundry equipment on one side. On the other was a wall and a heavy locked door. Mrs. Schroeder unlocked it and we went in.

Except for the ceiling, which still had the old water pipes and floor studs, the room looked like an electronics laboratory. Wires and tubes and transistors and a hundred other things I didn't understand were scattered over a long work counter.

In front of the counter was a canvas reclining chair, just like the one I'd seen in Dan Packer's furnished room. The only difference was that this one had something attached to it up where your head would go. It looked something like those head-rest gadgets on a barber's chair, only bigger, and with knobs and dials on it.

She saw me looking at it. "That's it, all right," she said, "but it isn't hooked up yet."

"It's the ultimate gimmick, the last gimmick, it's the thing that will make all other gimmicks unnecessary. In fact you might say it will make everything else unnecessary."

"I asked Johnny Walsh to meet us here. Outside of Dan Packer, who invented it, Johnny is about the only person in the world who really understands how it works."

She went to the door and unlocked it from the inside, let Walsh in, and locked it again.

Walsh was a short man, less than five feet tall, with a moon face and puffy cheeks. He was quite young, probably less than thirty. Mrs. Schroeder introduced us.

"Marge," he said, in a sorrowful tone, "you shouldn't have left it out in the open like that, you shouldn't have done it, you should have taken the headpiece off you should never leave it like that."

"I'm sorry, Johnny." She turned to me. "Johnny has his regular laboratory down at the Temple, but he uses this as a private lab."

He was bustling around the chair and checking over the wires and gadgets on the counter.

I noticed at that point that there were bars on the windows, which were high and just about at ground level. The window glass was painted over, too.

"Well," he said, "they broke into the Temple once, they tried to steal one, but the warning devices scared them off. You a technical man, Mr., uh——?"

"Good, then you won't really understand a word of what I'm going to tell you, won't be dangerous at all. Not that you'd really understand it even if you were an electrical engineer, unless you happened to be a neurologist, too."

"Dan Packer," said Mrs. Schroeder, "was a neurologist who was a television ham in his spare time, got very deeply into electronics and from there into electro-neurology, which I don't understand at all."

"My background," said Walsh, "is just the reverse, you might say. I'm an electrical engineer, but I had a couple of years of medical school."

Maybe I'd better say here before I go into the technical part, that in the first place I don't really understand how XP works, any more than I ever really understood how TV works, but then of course nobody except the technical guys can ever understand anything any more, and they can't understand a technical man in another branch.

In any case I have asked Dr. Karl Oster of our XP Engineering Division to listen to this memo and edit into the tape a few remarks here and there on the technical side. Is that right, Dr. Oster?

(Oster speaking. I will try to clarify a few matters, Mr. Martin, without going into any Con Chem classified material. The complete technical data are available for those who have been certified by management.)

Well, Mrs. Schroeder asked Walsh to go ahead and give me a kind of simple run-through on the machine. "If he's going to have to tell his people at Consolidated Chemical about it," she said, "he has to understand what it does, even if he doesn't understand how."

Johnny Walsh sat down beside me at the work counter. "What happens," he asked, "when you prick your finger?"

"No, it hurts in your brain. When you prick your finger you touch a nerve ending and it sends an impulse into your brain. If you block that nerve, cut it or deaden it with drugs anywhere between your finger and your brain, your finger won't hurt no matter how much you prick it."

"And of course the reverse is true. Did you ever hear of a man with an amputated leg complaining of a pain in his big toe? What he means is that there is a pain impulse in the nerve that used to go to his big toe."

"I understand that, too," I said. Like all men in business I can't help resenting it when technical men speak to us like children.

"Well, what is this impulse that is flowing through his leg? Actually every nerve impulse is just electricity. Every nerve cell is a small battery and conducting wire combined. The battery action itself is fascinating. It makes electricity by special eons of——"

This again is typical of technical men, who speak to you like a child one minute then talk perfect gibberish the next.

(Oster speaking. I think what Mr. Walsh was describing, Mr. Martin, was the accumulation of electrical charges in each nerve cell. This is accomplislied by an osmotic discharge of positive sodium ions and a retaining of negative ions. The point he was making was that the nervous system is an electrical network which creates its own current. Each nerve cell fires off an electrical charge of approximately 130 thousandths of a volt, which sets off the next one and so on until it reaches the brain. In fact, Mr. Martin, it is this very point about the electrical nature of XP that the Engineering Group has been trying to make with Management. It is the Engineering Group and not the Medical and Neurological Group that is the key to the operation.)

Anyway, Walsh went on to explain how every nerve is a cable, a whole bunch of nerve fibers. So really, what goes into your brain when you see with your eyes isn't a picture, but electricity, just like what goes over a coaxial cable for TV isn't a picture, but electricity.

"More than twenty years ago," Walsh said, "it was recognized that it would be possible for a man without eyes to see or a man without ears to hear, if the sight or sound impulses could be created and channeled somehow either into the optic and auditory nerves, or directly into the brain.

"That's where Dan Packer got started. He worked for about twelve years on the Auditory Project at the Rockefeller Foundation. They were trying to build the true hearing aid—not just an amplifier of sound, but a real electronic ear which could translate sound into a nerve pattern that could be received directly by the brain.

"Part of his work was with the sound impulses that came over the auditory nerves of animals. One amazing thing he discovered was that he could record the impulses that came over the auditory nerve of a chimpanzee—actually duplicate the pattern of nerve impulses on a magnetic tape.

"Then he found that the tape could be played back into the auditory nerve of the chimpanzee and the chimpanzee would hear it, though no actual sound was made. They could tell the chimp heard it because they'd trained the chimps to respond to certain voice commands, and they responded in the same way to the tape recordings.

"What's more, chimps whose ears had recently been removed responded in the same way to recordings that had been made from the auditory nerves of other chimpanzees.

"Well, naturally Packer jumped to a conclusion. He knew he wasn't recording sound, he was recording electrical impulses—and if it would work for auditory impulses it might work for any nerve impulse—for sight, smell, taste, pain, or anything else.

"So he began experimenting with touch and pain, and for the first time he was able to use human subjects because he no longer had to do dangerous head operations. But he did have to make actual contact between the nerve fibers and the recording machine."

(Oster speaking. Our re-creations of the early experiments indicate that the first contacts were made with micropipettes which were used as electrodes inserted into the individual fibers, a procedure which, I might add, was extremely painful to the subject. Nerve patterns could thereby be induced or, conversely, reproduced.)

He said it worked, though. They recorded sensations of hot and cold, pain, touch, and so on.

"But," Walsh said, and I'll try to follow it, "he recognized he would have to do it without contact with the nerve fibers. After a number of years he developed a sort of directional beam which would focus an impulse onto a nerve from outside the skin.

He had a clumsy gadget which looked something like a blood pressure gauge, only bigger. He strapped some electrodes to my wrist and plugged the machine into another gadget that looked like a tape recorder.

"That was hot!" It felt as though someone had touched my index finger with a hot poker, and yet I could see that nothing had touched my hand at all.

"Actually," he said, "it wasn't hot, it was very cold. Just a piece of dry ice. Try it again." He spun back the tape and started it again. "The sensations are very much the same."

The tape turned. I started to laugh, as I'm sure anyone would. First it felt that my hand was being dipped into warm water, then cold water, then into oozy mud. Wind blew on it, a dog—or something—licked it, and a hair was pulled out. Of course I was watching my hand the whole time and could see that nothing touched it at all.

"That," said Walsh, "was a big step forward, being able to beam the impulse into a nerve fiber. The next step was to reverse this—to record an impulse from outside the skin.

"Well, they had a feeling it was possible. The principle is something like tapping the audio system of a Vid with an induction coil. You realize that if you put an induction coil close to the transformer you can tap the sound without making contact with the wire."

"The FBI has done it for years. Nevertheless, this was the hardest step and one that took years to make. Here's a model of the first very simple induction recorder."

It didn't look simple to me. It was two feet square and loaded with wires and tubes.

I did and he clamped two heavy plates around my wrist. My hand reached through the machine and stuck out on the other side.

"Feel this." He put a small wrench in my hand. "Just turn it around in your fingers, get a good touch impression. Now try this." He put some coins in my hand. Then he dropped some warm water on it. "Okay, now we'll play it back."

He unclamped the recorder and then strapped the first set of electrodes back on my wrist. He plugged them into the recorder and started the tape.

I began to laugh again. First I felt the wrench, then the coins, and finally the warm water.

"It feels sort of fuzzy, though," I said. What I meant was, the water felt warm, but it didn't really feel wet.

"Really high fidelity didn't come till much later," he said. "But you can see we had here all the real bricks and mortar. We could record nerve impulses from one subject and play them back, either into the same subject, or into others."

"If you'll just think for a minute," said Mrs. Schroeder, "you'll realize that at this point they had all the building blocks for a recorder of experience."

"Experience?" I asked. I think it was beginning to trickle through my head, but it hadn't really hit me yet.

"Experience," said Walsh. "Everything a human being experiences comes to him through his sensory organs, and is transmitted to the brain in electrical nerve impulses. No matter how lifelike television gets, you'll always be a spectator. You'll always be watching—but not doing. Now we can do."

"Well," said Walsh, "naturally Dan realized he had on his hands the biggest thing in the world. He left the Rockefeller Foundation and tried to perfect the gadget himself, but he finally ran out of money. So he took this job with the Yourchurch here because they were really after the same thing, and they gave him plenty of money to work with. At first, anyway.

"He didn't care about just the sense of touch. He was interested in all the senses—so he turned to the brain. Now you may think of the brain as a separate organ. It isn't. It's an extension of the nervous system, made up largely of nerve cells. The same electrical principles hold true of the brain. It's like a big switchboard."

"Well, it would have been easy if the sensory nerves all entered the brain at one point. They don't. The optic nerves——"

(Oster speaking. Walsh was evidently describing the points at which the sensory nerves enter the brain. The optic nerve enters the thalamus, which is the innermost and most inaccessible portion of the brain. Smells go in an almost primitive manner to the olfactory lobes, and so on. All these may be seen very simply in any diagram of the brain, regardless of how mysterious our friends of the Medical Group like to make them seem.)

Now all this, Walsh was saying, makes it hard to get a focus, though exactly why I'm not sure.

(Oster speaking. Mr. Martin is trying to explain the focus of induction here. It has always been difficult in recording impressions to focus the sensory impulses accurately—to focus, say, from the optic nerve onto the induction recorder. Sometimes it takes hours to make a recording focus for all the senses, so that the experience is sharp, clear, and lifelike.)

It was hard to get the recording focus and at first it was just as hard to get the picture back from the tape into the brain. It was until they discovered a trick way to beam it back, which I don't even pretend to understand.

(Oster speaking. Packer discovered the principle of selective induction almost by accident while trying to focus a tape onto a brain, a process which at first took many hours, and would have made the commercial application of XP totally impracticable. While making a focus, he allowed the apparatus to slip and beam the impulses directly into the cerebral cortex, or "gray matter" of the forebrain, or cerebrum. The accidental induction to the cerebral cortex created a sharp focus almost immediately. This meant that the tape could be "played back" with considerable ease and without complicated adjustments. Unfortunately we still can not record by selective induction, we can only play back. The "taking of the picture" so to speak is still a very long and difficult process.)

"Maybe," Walsh said, "you'd like to receive one of the first elementary all-senses head tapes."

"I never even understood the telephone," she said. "Furthermore I don't believe in it."

"This is really much simpler than stereo-color television, electronically speaking," said Walsh. "Wonder it wasn't thought of first. Main reason, I guess, was that the electronics boys didn't have any neurological savvy. Too specialized."

I did. My head rested on the apparatus. Walsh took a strap and snapped it around my head.

"We call it the head-belt," he said. "It's the only special attachment we need." He turned some wheels and the machinery settled itself around my head. I say "machinery," but even in those days it wasn't much bigger than a thing for drying your hair.

"Packer was afraid at first that it would be necessary, but the amount of distortion caused by the hair is negligible."

"It's best," said Mrs. Schroeder, "if you close your eyes and try to be receptive."

I closed my eyes and tried to relax. The first thing I noticed was the smell of electricity that made me think of the days when we used to play with electric trains. Then my head was filled with buzzing and a flashing of lights.

All at once, just like a picture snapping onto a screen, I was standing in a room and looking outdoors at grass and trees. I wasn't watching a picture of it, I was there. I could feel that the air around me was warm and I could smell food. The only unusual sensations I had were feeling a heavy weight on my head, and a peculiar goose-pimple reaction.

My eyes looked down to a table. On it was a ham sandwich and a glass of beer. My hand picked up the sandwich. I say "my" hand because I could feel the muscular sensation of reaching, feel the bread, and notice the weight of the sandwich. But it wasn't really my hand, it was heavier and hairier than mine and the fingernails were dirty. I opened my mouth and took a bite. It was a good sandwich, but there was a little too much mustard on it. I chewed the bite, and then picked up the glass of beer. I took a long drink, almost half a glass. Tasted like Budweiser, I thought, very nice. I put down the glass. I could feel the beer sliding down. My mouth said, in a voice that was deeper than my own, "Was it okay? Did you get the take?" And I heard somebody behind me and to the right answer, "Okay, it's a take. Cut."

Then I was sitting back in the reclining chair, from which of course I really hadn't moved at all.

"Wouldn't it be easier," I said, "just to give me a sandwich and a glass of beer?" Though I have always been noted in the Company for Vision, of which I have a great deal, I still hadn't absorbed the whole size of this yet.

"That was our first tape, remember. A bit fuzzy, and some static. Tends to goose-flesh a little. And we hadn't compensated for head weight of the recorder."

Already my Vision was beginning to work. It is very difficult to keep good Vision down, I find. "Why," I said, "I should think you could duplicate almost anything."

"Even, uh, even—?" I have always maintained that there is a very basic element in all of us.

"Sex?" asked Mrs. Schroeder, looking at me steadily. "Especially sex, Mr. Martin. The reception is perfect."

"On less than twenty-five watts of electricity," said Walsh, "you can make love to the most beautiful girls in the world. As often as you like, as long as you like."

"But is it, I mean——" I could tell that I was blushing, a thing that I do only very rarely.

"You mean," said Walsh, "do you really experience all the sensations? Why, Mr. Martin, you haven't really experienced anything if you've just done it in the flesh! Remember how we turned down the volume on the sensation of extreme cold? We can turn the volume up, too—on anything. For erotic sensations we usually turn the volume up to about three times normal. Beyond that—since the sensations of sexual enjoyment really border on pain—the experience becomes too painful."

"Whatever a human being can experience," said Mrs. Schroeder, "we can put on tape. Would you like to do skin diving in the Red Sea and fight an octopus? Like to be at the tiller of a yacht in an ocean race? Drive a Mercedes through the Alps at a hundred miles an hour without any danger? Have a Roman orgy with fountains of wine, twenty courses of food, and a dozen slave girls? Once the tape is made it can be duplicated and you can run it any number of times for the cost in electricity of burning a small electric bulb."

I remembered what Packer said about the last invention. I guessed he wasn't too far wrong.

Now I have always been one to make fast decisions. At that moment I made one. "Yes," I said, "I am. If you'll make preparations for a complete demonstration, I think I can arrange to have a group fly out here tomorrow or the next day. I'm sure that we can come to an agreement that will satisfy us all. There should be no reason why we couldn't begin manufacturing equipment in a matter of months."

"Perhaps we've given you the wrong impression, Mr. Martin," said Mrs. Schroeder. "Neither Mr. Packer nor Mr. Walsh nor I own the rights to the invention. And the reason I brought you here was not to make an arrangement to have it manufactured."

"We were hoping that Consolidated Chemical would be big enough to get control of the invention—and destroy it completely."

Well, I guess I must have had a mighty funny expression, because here I was face to face with the biggest boon to mankind since television. That is, if properly handled. And what were they asking? To destroy it!

"You'll see," said Mrs. Schroeder, "that it's the only possible course if you don't want us to wind up as a whole world full of complete morons. Just go back seventy years or so. Along came radio and people didn't have to read any more; they could just lie back and listen. But they still had to contribute something, a little imagination. They had to picture something to themselves. Then came television and they didn't have to imagine any more. They had to make less contribution.

"But even that wouldn't have been so bad if it hadn't fallen into the hands of the survey boys. They told us what the great majority wanted."

I'm trying to tell all this just the way she said it, though needless to say you can all imagine how I felt about this kind of talk, which practically strikes at the roots of our whole merchandising philosophy.

"I don't see what's wrong," I said, trying to keep a smile on my face and to be diplomatic, "with giving people what they want."

She and Walsh just looked at each other, as though to say they thought I was hopeless or something.

"If you give all the people what sixty per cent of the people want," she said, "and put it in a fancy enough package, and don't give them anything else to choose from, then your standards will go down, almost as fast as your techniques go up.

"Already our capacity for attention has gone down so far that fewer and fewer of us can stay interested in a printed page. It has become totally impossible for a serious artist in any field to make a living honestly practicing his art. More and more they're turning to inventing little puzzles for each other, something intricate to solve."

I couldn't see any sense in making the world safe for screwballs like the ones who were upstairs, but I figured I had better bury my own feelings, as we so often have to do in the interests of the Company.

"Now you take this machine," she said, "and combine it with a really efficient survey technique, and what have you got?"

At this point I was actually way ahead of her. It seemed to me that we would really have something all right. I just let her go on.

"You have got," she said, "a complete lack of any audience contribution, completely passive entertainment, and aimed at the lowest common denominator."

"You would have the biggest audience in history," I said, and I would like to go on record as being the first one to make such a prediction.

This Walsh fellow was just sitting there listening and braiding some wires or something, and I guess he was smart enough to see I wasn't exactly buying the point.

"I think," he said, "we also ought to consider the effect of something like this on business. Look at St. Louis. Already business is going to pot."

"What difference does it make who runs it?" he asked. "What will happen to business if nobody needs to buy anything? Why buy a car if you can ride in the best car in the world for two cents worth of electricity? Why buy expensive food when you can just stow in essential nourishment and eat like a king for a penny?"

I guess what he meant was, who would buy from anybody else but us? Not that it was as simple as all that, as any merchandising man knows, since you have to keep up purchasing power, and all that. However, if you have got something that everybody wants and will pay good money for, then you're in business.

But if I do flatter myself, I was smart enough to see that they were beginning to wonder if I was their boy. I mean, if I didn't seem like I was cooperating, I wouldn't have a chance at this thing. So I figured I would have to call on my acting talents which are not great, but if I do say so myself, were good enough to get me practically the leading role once in a college play.

So I pretended to look very worried, and said, "Gosh, I hadn't thought about that. That would be terrible, wouldn't it?"

"Before you know it," said Walsh, "there will be cobwebs in the streets. Your factories will be empty, your machines will be rusty."

I was still not buying this idea, though the way they said it would make a timid person a bit scared.

"Now you've got me really worried," I said, putting on a worried expression. "Okay, suppose I can talk our people into doing what you say. What's the next step?"

"All the rights," said Mrs. Schroeder, "are held in Jed Simmons' name. We'll arrange for you to see him. But eventually you'll have to work through Artie Decker. He's the fellow who runs things."

I knew I was, all right, but not the way she and this Walsh fellow thought. And I bet all of you hearing this memo will bear me out.

The next morning I sat down in front of the Vid in my hotel room and put through a call to Ben Burry at headquarters in Port Washington. It was ten after nine Central time, or ten after ten there.

The switchboard operator smiled and said, "Con Chem's Katie, Happy Momsday!" It made me realize we only had about ten days till Momsday, and I still hadn't done my shopping. I said Happy Momsday to her, too, and she put me on to Regina, Ben's secretary, sitting at her desk in the middle of all those nice simulated colonial wormholes.

"Why, hello, Mr Martin," she said, turning her dimple toward the Vid lens, "Happy Momsday!"

"But they don't know anything about the St. Louis situation. That's what I'm finding out."

I should have known that my going away wouldn't stop high-level thinking at Con Chem, which went on all the time, even when they had very little to go on. You just can't turn off a high-level thinker, particularly of our type.

"Well, Regina, maybe you could let me know when he's free." I couldn't very well ask him to call me, since he was on a higher level, but this would amount to the same thing.

"I'll be only too glad, Mr. Martin," said Regina, giving me the dimple. She was probably swinging her leg, too, but the Vid only shot you down to the desk. "However, the way he talked, I think it will ver-ry likely be all day. Even the agency is coming in after lunch."

"Listen, Ben," I said, speaking distinctly for the tape, "I've got hold of something here that's red hot. It isn't exactly the answer to the St. Louis situation; it's bigger than that. It's so big I can't tell you over the Vid. Try to get back to me, Ben." I paused and then said, "That's all, Regina, would you mind typing the front?"

"Thanks," I said, and "be good!" In fact, it is possible I even jollied her a little after that, for it is just as well to keep on good personal though not intimate terms with the secretary of your superior, a fact I imagine you young fellows have discovered for yourselves.

I went down and had breakfast and after that I figured it would be time to call Mrs. Schroeder at the Temple. She was there, though of course she looked slightly different on the Vid than she did the night before, as she was not wearing her date dress. I said I would take her up on the offer of an introduction to Mr. Jed Simmons, and when could I come over.

"Well," she said, "I'm not sure if he's well this morning, he hasn't come in yet." What she meant, I discovered later, was she didn't know if he was drunk or not. Mr. Simmons did quite a bit of drinking, and somewhat more than what you would call social drinking.

I took a cab down to the Temple. There were still crowds and police lines so we drove around back to the office entrance. The offices were on the other side of the block in an old house that was connected in the back with the supermarket they'd turned into the Temple. When I went in people were running back and forth and hollering. Some carpenters were fitting pre-fab partitions to the walls to make new offices. Nobody noticed me at all, in fact I almost got knocked down by a partition being carried by four carpenters.

I saw Mrs. Schroeder sailing by with a handful of papers, but she was going so fast I didn't catch her till the second trip. "Tell Artie Decker I'll be right there," she yelled to somebody who was going down a corridor. "Oh, hello, Mr. Martin, I'm so sorry you came all the way down, Mr. Simmons still isn't here, ooops, be careful of that partition! You can see it's a regular madhouse around here, we're expanding so fast, we've just got to get more space—Jimmy, tell the NBC news people they can't have that video tape of Molly in the bath tub; we're not releasing it—I'm sorry, Mr. Martin, let's just step into the corner here, I'm trying to stay away from my office for two minutes, to keep away from the blasted Vid, it's been ringing all morning—Jimmy, you can tell NBC we've got a beautiful Momsday tape of Molly, shot with her own Mom; it's inspirational as hell."

"Molly's old lady is a madam in San Berdoo, but we hired the best Mom in the business, with practically a built-in rocking chair. Listen, Mr. Martin, it may be after lunch when Jed Simmons drifts in. You want to see the product, you want to sit through a session in the Temple? The eleven o'clock one starts in a few minutes."

"I oughta warn you, it can get to be a habit. Tell you what, though, I'll give you a special switch-off chair, we don't give 'em to the regular congregation. If it starts sendin' you too hard, you can push a button and turn it off. We've got a place kind of like a client's booth."

I decided I'd take a chance. After all the things I'd seen the night before I figured I had a real Mission, and nothing could make me stop Hitting the Line. In fact, as I think back on it now, I guess it was only this strong sense of my Mission for Con Chem that did keep me on the rails with all the temptation I had to go through for business reasons. It is something for us all to think about.

"Great. Come back here after the session and maybe by then Jed will be out of the woods. Jimmy! Come here!"

A young fellow with buck teeth and pimples came up and she introduced us. "Take Mr. Martin to Mezzanine A, Jimmy, and see he gets hooked up right, will you?"

I turned back to thank Mrs. Schroeder, but she was already sailing into an office waving a sheet of paper.

We went through several doors until we came to one marked "A." When he opened that we were inside the Temple, sort of high up like in a theater box, looking down on the people. There were probably two thousand already sitting down, more than half of them in a solid block, every seat taken.

"General admission, they been here for forty-five minutes. Plenty of 'em waited all night outside. These others are reserved seats."

The reserved seat people were mostly seated, but more were coming in. And I guess the men outnumbered the women thirty or forty to one.

All the seats were sort of reclining. When the people sat down a leg rest shot out and went partly under the seat ahead. Each seat had a head set on the back, with a band that went around your head.

I guess you could say they did the best they could to make the supermarket look like a cathedral, with Gothic arches painted around the walls, but it wasn't exactly shaped right, being kind of low and square. I thought it was all done in quite good taste, considering. All around the walls were Momsday decorations in pink and blue, with a few soft-glow neon Whistlers, one of which winked on and off. It created a nice feeling.

"Just sit down here," said Jimmy. I sat down in one of the reclining chairs, though this one wasn't folding, since there were no seats in front of me, only the railing.

"Here's your head belt," he said, "you can snap it yourself. Like this." He snapped it around my forehead. I could see that the ushers downstairs were helping the people snap into theirs. Just then, in the front of the Temple, right over the place where the choir stand was, a sign lit up and said, "Fasten your head belts, please."

"Here on the arm," Jimmy said, "is a switch-off button. If you want to turn off the head set, just push. You won't, though, not for long. Hang on tight around the curves, pal." This of course was just a figure of speech, since the chair never actually moved.

In a couple of minutes, at exactly eleven, the lights dimmed and the Momsday neon went off. The headset began to hum very softly, though nothing was actually coming through it.

About two dozen young boys in black velvet suits came out, and at the same time maybe a dozen young girls in gold dresses came out from the other side. They all had high voices and were singing a Momsday Carol, the one which begins, "M is for the million things you gave me." This particular one I am forced to admit leaves me fairly cold, though I am told it brings a tear to many. All this was happening up front, where the altar would have been if they had one, though they didn't, certainly not in the Episcopal sense.

As the boys and girls marched to their places in the choir stand, big glitter letters each one six feet high or more came up I guess from a slot in the floor and spelled out:

The minute they were all the way up, the choir hit a high note and held it, and Molly Blood rose up out of the floor, too. She had on her plain white dress, with long sleeves and a high neck, though there was very little doubt what was inside of it, it was so tight. I doubt very much also, if she had on anything underneath, a point I was later to prove to some extent.

The skirt was pretty long, but it was split a little above the knees. Her sleeves had long white drapes from her wrists to her armpits, so that when she spread her arms, which was quite often, you thought she was going to take off and fly.

She walked out on something like a short ramp to the place where the microphone was. A spotlight followed her all the way.

I could still hear the headset humming, but up to this time there was no result from it. All this I was seeing with my eyes.

When Molly got out to the end of the ramp she spread her arms out, gave a big smile and said in a very slightly Bronx accent, "I love you all. God loves you all."

I sort of thought she ought to have put God first, but I guess they had surveyed it all and found this went over better.

Everybody said they did. It was kind of a roar. She didn't go into whether they loved God, but I'm sure they would have said so, too.

They all said they were, and I could hardly help joining in, trying to think as I did so exactly what sins I was sorry for. I had not had much opportunity to be sorry with Harriet yet, but there were a number of memos I should have answered and didn't, and other odds and ends.

The headset was humming a little louder and it was beginning to feel warmer on the back of my head, but still nothing was coming out of it.

"Everybody join in now, everybody!" She and the choir started singing a song called, I believe, "Wash In The Blood Of The Lamb," the tune of which was quite familiar to me since it seemed to have been taken from our own "Ever Faithful To You, Con Chem" which all of you know from our get-togethers such as the Year End Sales Meetings, to mention only one.

While we were singing a very funny thing happened. The lights in the Temple started to go down, and down, and down until it was almost pitch dark. The only thing you could see was Molly, just barely lit up with a soft bluish-white spot.

I heard a light click in the headset and at the same time even the spot on Molly went off. Then gradually it came up again, but the strange thing was that I was seeing her from another angle, and much closer. It was as though I changed seats to one right down in practically the front row.

Also, I was singing the right words to the song, which I didn't know, in a voice which I will have to admit was slightly better than my own, though mine is certainly not too bad, as many of you know from our get-togethers.

I pressed the button on the arm of the chair. It stopped me from singing in this other voice. Most of the other voices had stopped, too. I was back up in the box seat again, though that was hard to tell as it was almost completely dark, I couldn't see Molly at all any more.

I pushed the button again and there I was back in almost the front row and singing in the new voice.

What was happening, I hardly need to explain to you, was that all this was now coming over the XP tape right into my head. This was one of the first examples of what we now call a Real-to-XP Dissolve, or Cross-Fade from real life to the XP tape.

I walked up the aisle—which wasn't much of a walk I was sitting so far front—keeping my eyes right on Molly. Once my eyes dropped and I could see I was wearing a double-breasted electric blue sharkskin suit with sharp corners, and blue suede shoes. It wasn't exactly what I would have picked out for myself.

When I was halfway there, Molly started to come toward me, walking with that special oozing motion and letting her hips swing as far as they would in the very tight dress.

I came to her so much that her body was touching me practically from top to bottom. If there was anything under the dress you certainly couldn't feel it.

"Love," she said almost in a whisper, and opened her lips. I kissed her, and I might add without any breach of modesty since actually I wasn't exactly on my own, that I did a very thorough job, and in fact learned a few things I never knew before. Molly's body in the tight dress made a kind of slow writhing movement which I could feel from my knees right up to my chest. It was considerably more than the seven seconds I had with Harriet, and when it stopped I was certainly in a loving frame of mind.

When you think that every man in the audience was doing the same thing, it's not hard to understand why the Temple was packing them in, and why the Yourchurch audience was beginning to drop off, in spite of its powerful entertainment devices.

"Love," she said again, and looked slightly past my left shoulder. Her eyes began to move just barely from left to right as though she had to read some kind of a prompter. "In this glorious Momsday season, let us all remember whenever possible the love that our Moms bear for us whether in this world or the next. Cast the hate out—" She paused for a second, and I guessed they must have been changing the prompt cards or something. ". . . of your hearts," she went on a little faster, "and let us remember at all times that love is the main thing. Let us have a hymn."

I guess the choir was still there, but I didn't look in that direction. It could have been a recording just as well. This is one thing about XP. You only look where the original subject looked, and I don't need to point out the considerable production savings this can involve, and does of course even to this day.

Anyway, the choir started singing, and this time I didn't join in because Molly had me by the hand and we were walking back toward what you would probably call the altar. We looked at the big heart-shaped symbol with the words LOVE and GOD crossed on it, and we blew a kiss at them.

Then we turned and walked up a flight of stairs which had rhinestones in the risers. It was the first time I had ever walked up rhinestone stairs, and in fact I was about to do several more things for the first time, too, you might say.

We came to a door at the top of the stairs. It had the LOVE-GOD letters on it, also in rhinestones, to say nothing of several pink and blue cupids wrapped in bows that said "Happy Momsday." I guessed the whole tape was made just for this season.

I opened the door and almost expected to find a bed inside. Needless to say, this was not the case. However, before I go any farther I want to say now that there is no point in lingering too long over an experience of this type, which can certainly be damaging to the morale in more ways than one. I am only going into this much detail to show you the sort of thing our St. Louis sales organization was up against.

The room was very small and the walk were quilted all around in white satin, a style of decoration which is most common I guess in the more expensive type candy shops. They went them one better, though, as the buttons of the quilting were all rhinestones, also.

There wasn't any furniture in the room, only a sort of small altar with the heart symbol on it and one large lit candle. Molly and I went up to it and kneeled side by side on a cushion. I looked straight at the candle. In fact, I kept my eyes right on the candle flame for the longest time.

Molly started to speak, very softly, with a kind of throb in her voice. "It is not enough just to love," she said. "It has got to be only the purest type love. You have got to purge from your mind all thoughts of impure type love."

She kept on talking like this, but I confess I do not remember all she said because of the really extraordinary things that were happening to me, and which I will attempt to describe as impersonally as I am able, though that may be difficult as they were highly personal.

I do remember that there was incense burning, something which normally makes me either cough or sneeze, though it didn't at this time, I suppose because the recording subject did not have the same allergies I do.

I was lying on a bed. This is hard to understand because all the time I was kneeling in front of the candle and looking right at it.

I felt I was lying on a bed, I should say, and I could feel very clearly that I had no clothes on.

What they did, I learned later, was to run two tracks together, one of them with the sight and sound of Molly and me all dressed and kneeling in front of the candle, and this other one that must have been made in the dark, with no sound, but with a great deal of other things.

First I felt a warm, soft woman's hand stroking me very gently. Then a woman's lips pressed down on mine and stayed there, though this did not stop the hand. I kept looking at the flame of the candle and Molly kept talking about keeping love on a high plane and the soft warm hand kept moving and the lips kept kissing and I felt a woman's warm body with no clothes on whatever touch me all over.

I started to say, "I beg your pardon," which seemed appropriate at the moment, and perhaps I did, sitting in the box seat in the Temple, but you couldn't hear it in this room.

Now I know some of you will say, "Why didn't you push the button and turn the whole thing off?" All I know is that I did not. And besides, the atmosphere was extremely moral because all the time I was looking at the candle and Molly's voice was telling me to struggle with myself and cast out my evil desires and triumph over them.

What I was feeling, I guessed, was just an illustration of the evil desires, and quite a clear one I might add.

When the woman's body touched me they must have turned the sensation volume up to about triple, by which I mean you felt it three times as much, if possible.

In fact the result was such a good illustration that if you don't mind I would prefer not dwelling on what happened for about the next half hour or so. You might say I cast the evil desires out, all right, because after that time I had for all practical purposes very little desire of any kind.

I turned away from the candle and Molly looked at me and asked if I had triumphed over myself. I said I had, although you realize it wasn't exactly me talking.

"Bless you, then, my child," she said and took me by the hand. We went back out through the rhinestone door and down the rhinestone steps, though you couldn't see the rhinestones much on the way down.

I left Molly up there in the front of the Temple and walked down to my seat near the center aisle. Everybody sang a couple of hymns and Molly made a little talk about how fine love was, if kept sufficiently pure.

Then as Molly and the choir marched out, the lights went down until it was almost completely dark. I heard the little click in my headset again and pretty soon the lights went up. This time I was sitting in the box seat at the side and I was wearing my own clothes again. The XP tape was over.

"Quite good," I said, trying to mask my feelings, as we all should in such situations. "Are they all like that?"

"Some of them are even more so. They toned this one down on account of Momsday. Personally, I think Momsday is a lot of crap, don't you?"

Irresponsible remarks like that make me very angry, showing as they do no understanding of what Momsday means to business, and what business means to us all. To say nothing of our Moms.

He unhooked the head strap and I got up. I am told that after an experience like this many men are a trifle wobbly. I was fine, however. On the way out I grabbed the door jamb for a second and then I was perfectly okay.

"In half an——" He looked at me again to see if I was kidding, which of course I was. Although I am told that many men had two sessions in a row, and there are cases of men who had every session all day, or about nine of them. Personally I find this difficult to believe, but it is supposed to be an actual fact. The expense alone would be considerable.

One thing puzzled me, however. "Maybe," I said to Jimmy, "you could straighten me out on something."

"Well, I mean the women sitting in the audience." There had been only a few of them, but still I wondered.

"Oh, them. They don't get the same tape. They get straight stained-glass type stuff. Not that we couldn't make a tape for them, I mean a real tape. We could. With a woman subject on the recorder. But right now we can't handle all the men."

Jimmy left me at Mrs. Schroeder's door. Her office was just a square of temporary partitions, the outside of which was being painted at that moment. Mrs. Schroeder was talking on the Vid, but she waved me in.

"We can send you a very fine Video-tape," she was saying. "Very recent, with Momsday decorations."

I looked at her Vid and guessed she was talking to a man at CBS News. I could tell by the blue office, and by the fact that he seemed to be the deep-thinking type.

"That we got, too," she said. "It proves there is a great rebirth in spiritual feeling."

He looked carefully at his cigarette and narrowed his eyes in very deep thought.

"Really?" he said, but the way he said it made you realize how much thinking was behind it.

"We can use that," he said. "We haven't had a re-awakening since the big Yourchurch push in 1988."

"Just between us," she said, "this is on a higher plane. And you understand, some of my best friends are Yourchurch."

They rang off in a moment, but not before she had promised to send him a Video-tape of Molly in a tight dress.

"Leave it to us, to take every miracle of science and make Schmierkase out of it. Well, if you're ready I think we can get under way now." She stopped for a second and then called out, "Yoo-hoo, Mr. Martin!"

I realized then that I wasn't exactly listening to what she was saying, and I noticed I was sort of unconsciously humming a waltz. I thought of Van Cleve and got a bit frightened. I figured I really had to get hold of myself.

"Don't worry, it's quite normal after a session. Jed came in a few moments ago. I think I can sneak you in for a while before lunch."

"More than ever," I said, which was certainly true, at least from the standpoint that I wanted Con Chem to buy the rights. In fact, from the very moment of the session there was no longer any doubt in my mind at all. My only worry was whether we could get it before some other big outfit did.

As we walked down the corridor an embarrassing thing happened. Jimmy, the fellow who escorted me to the Temple, was standing alongside the water cooler with another young fellow. I couldn't help overhearing what they said.

"And get this," Jimmy was saying, "when I went back to unstrap him I asked him how it was and he said, 'Quite good,' you know, like he was talking about a necktie. 'Quite good,' he says, and then he staggers outa there!" They both laughed, and then Jimmy saw me and it was quite embarrassing.

I think I ought to point out here, though, that I definitely did not "stagger out of there," though I did steady myself on the door jamb, as I mentioned earlier.

Mrs. Schroeder pretended not to notice this, but it was perfectly clear that she heard the remark.

It was the only one around that had real walls, not partitions. The door was closed. Inside a woman was talking, you might almost say shouting.

"What it boils down to usually is that she doesn't want God to get top billing."

The door swung open and Molly stood holding the knob and facing back toward the office. She was wearing a black suit with a white blouse, but even in the suit Molly looked practically naked, I imagine because of the way she was built. An expensive Newlon-mink stole was over her shoulders, and she was wearing dark glasses, even though it wasn't at all glaring in the office. I guessed it was so people wouldn't recognize her, though I had no trouble personally.

Molly turned and walked past us. She had a longhaired dachshund in her arms and he was growling. Somehow as she went by me I felt I knew her quite well, though of course we had not met. And I imagine this did not seem to Mrs. Schroeder a good time to introduce us.

Just a few steps beyond us, Molly spun around on her high heel and said, "Oh, Schroedy, be a doll and stop by my dressing room before the three o'clock show, will you, baby?"

"Maybe," she said, "I ought to leave you two alone, Mr. Simmons." She always called him Mr. Simmons. Everybody except Molly did.

I can describe him best to you by saying he looked like pictures of Abraham Lincoln except that he had white hair and kind of a flabbier mouth, like he was God's executive vice president. But shaky.

The office was big and new-painted and had new metal furniture in it, and it smelled of bourbon. Nailed up on the walls were a big picture of Molly, and dozens of autographed photos. One of them was the Mayor of Los Angeles, just to give you an idea.

"Join me in a drink, Mr. Martin?" He pulled a bottle of bourbon out of the desk, and a couple of glasses.

"Don't mind if I do," I said, though as all of you know I prefer not drinking in business hours except during such festive occasions as a Christmas or Momsday office party.

He poured whisky in the glasses, and nothing else, not even ice, and handed it to me, I had to admit it was very good bourbon, as it would have to be to drink like that.

"I'll get straight to the point, Mr. Simmons," I said, "as I know you're a very busy man. We at Con Chem believe we can help you in the good work you are doing."

The "good work" pitch seemed like a nice handle at the time, though of course result-wise it proved to be wrong.

"Good work!" he said, rising up out of his chair and towering over me. "Good work! We have scarcely begun our good work!"

He still had the glass of bourbon in his hand and his eyes had a look which I guess might be called inspired. I have seen it once or twice in some of our top sales managers when they were whipping up a meeting to a real pitch. I might add that this is a fine art, also.

"We are building our following, my son! When we are ready, our real work will begin!" He leaned down toward me and almost whispered, "I'd like you to see my new robe!"

He stepped to a wardrobe cabinet and took out a long black velvet robe with an ermine collar. He slipped into it and spread his arms. It made long wings like Molly's, and on each wing was a red heart.

"My children!" he spoke out, in a voice that made the glass in the window shake. "It will give you an idea, my son. I'm working out the message now. Picture an audience of three thousand people. The house lights dim. They put a spot light on me. I step forward, raise my arms, and——"

The door opened and a man came part way in. He was dark, he needed a shave, he had a barrel chest and long dangling arms. He was in shirt sleeves with a sleeveless sweater. The knot in his tie was pulled down and his collar was open.

"It's important," the man said, standing there looking straight at Simmons and letting his long arms dangle. For a moment they just stared at each other. Then Simmons sat down, robe and all.

"I did it. I sewed up the Arena for July and August, but it won't do any good unless we can get another five thousand headsets."

"Even if we subcontract the parts and assemble them ourselves they'll be about $1,500 apiece."

I put in that figure to make all you production men smile, and to show you what really efficient mass production can do. Compare that with today's prices for headsets!

"It's a matter of about seven and a half million dollars, and we'll need another two or three million for——"

"Okay," said Artie, staring right at him. "I'll swing it. I'll have to put the clamps on a coupla guys, but I'll swing it I think."

"Oh, Artie," said Simmons. "Remind me to tell you that there's a clause in Molly's contract that——"

"She told me. It's fixed," said Artie, without even turning around. "I'll shoot you a carbon if you want." He slammed the door.

I knew then that I was wasting my time talking to anybody else but Artie Decker.

"That was really what I meant," I said to Simmons, "about helping you with your work. In return for certain manufacturing rights, Con Chem could supply you with money."

"Artie Decker worries about money, not I. The message is the thing. Listen. The house lights dim. I step forward, raise my arms and say——"

He gave me the message just the way he would give it to three thousand people, and I guess if they'd all been there they would have heard it, too. Very few men, even top sales managers, have a voice that could top his. The message was about sin and lifting up your hearts, and I have to admit it sounded okay, sincere-wise, though somewhat confused.

After roughly twenty minutes of this I said, "I am very grateful for the message. I'm sure everyone who hears it will be a better man, or woman as the case may be. But now I have to be getting back to the office. Mind if I stop and see Mr. Decker?"

The minute I stepped into the hallway a girl got up from her desk. She was an Irish girl in a sweater with pushed-up sleeves and she had kind of a tousled look, like somebody who has been doing three things at once all day.

"Pardon me, Mr. Martin," she said, "Artie Decker would like to see you if you have a minute."

"Won't be long," she told them, I guess because she was sliding me in ahead. "Artie wanted to see Mr. Martin special."

We went in. Artie, still in the sleeveless sweater, was crouched in front of his Vid.

"Who from, lemme talk to 'em. Listen, baby, I'll call you back, okay?" He snapped off. "Hello, Mr. Martin, thanks a lot for stoppin' in."

Before I could open my mouth, the girl said, "Just one thing first, Artie. Jolley says what discount on a dozen special personal tapes?"

"He'll take 'em." She went out. I had sort of a feeling I was on the Frontier, like in all new disorganized industries.

"I tell you, Artie Decker knows everything. I gotta remember to can her. Trouble is, she's a damn good publicity dame. I'm not worried you'd junk it, baby, you're not the type. Besides, we're not selling."

That threw me a little, but I pride myself on being a good judge of men, which is after all one of the most essential parts of being a good executive, and a sense which I think we develop at Con Chem. I thought I had Artie Decker pretty well sized up.

"How'd you like to be one of the biggest men in the U.S.A., Artie?" That stopped him. "This is a two-bit operation. Peanuts."

"It won't be." He wiped his face. "I'm always sweating," he said, "I wish I could stop."

And, as a matter of fact, every time I think of Artie Decker I think of him wiping his face. I never saw a man sweat so much just sitting down.

Having from time to time played poker, a game that is sometimes valuable in business training, I decided to take a chance.

"You know, of course," I said, "that we really don't have to buy your gimmick. Matter of fact, if we wanted to make things unpleasant for you we could. Do you realize that some of the inductors in your recording apparatus are controlled by our patents—to say nothing of your headsets?"

Needless to say, this was a pure bluff, as I was not entirely sure what an inductor was.

"Yeah?" said Artie, sweating still more. The thing was that Artie wasn't sure what an inductor was, either, though he knew who made them and what they cost.

"Inter Electric," I said. "One of our subsidiaries. We hold more than five thousand patents." That much of course was true, except that it was closer to seven thousand. In fact it would have taken a month probably to make sure whether we really did control any of the patents in their gimmick. As we discovered later there were quite a few gadgets in the recorder that we could have made a case on.

"Our boys could reproduce your equipment in less than a year. Sure, you'd be able to slap an injunction on us—but we could do the same against you.. Might tie each other up for years."

"We'd sue you for a billion," said Artie, but he sounded scared—paper-scared you might say, and it is today's most common type I imagine.

I put on my big meeting smile. "Artie," I said, "all I meant was, we oughta be friends. There is no need for us to fight, since there is more than enough for all of us. In fact, this is probably the biggest day in your whole life."

"I can't make the deal now without talking to Headquarters, but there's no reason we couldn't work out a very good set-up capital gains-wise, plus an exchange of stock, plus a terrific top level spot for you personally, plus a number of very nice participations. That is, if you can deliver the rights to the gimmick."

"Maybe a license to manufacture," he said, and I could see he was at least being sensible.

"Okay." He gave me his hand. It was sweaty. "You never had a sample yet did you, Marty?" he said, giving me a wink.

"Drop around, like tonight, Marty. I'll give you the special discount. Fifteen hundred bucks only."

"The regular price is two thousand. I got a waiting list from here to breakfast. I just give you a chance to slip in ahead. Forget it, huh?"

"No," I said, and I want to make it clear that I was acting only in the spirit of scientific inquiry, "I'd like to try it."

After lunch I went up to my room and called New York again. Regina came on the Vid. For some reason, she didn't knock me for so much of a loop as usual, even though she looked just as good, if not better.

"Get him out of the meeting, Regina." I guess it was the first time I'd ever said anything like that.

"Call Mr. Burry out of the meeting?" I might just as well have spit on the flower bed that had our Motto in it. "It's in Mr. Howard's office!"

That almost stopped me. A meeting in Mr. Howard's office was really top level. Even Ben would probably be a Chair Seven or maybe Eight in a meeting like that.

Regina just shook her head and got up, without even turning off the Vid. I guess she was in practically a state of shock. I sat there looking at the polished wormholes behind her desk. After a few minutes there was a cross-wipe to Ben Burry just sitting down at his desk, still out of breath.

"Listen, Marty," said Ben, running his stubby fingers through his shaggy hair, "do you realize I was in Jim Howard's office?"

"I know, Ben. You'll understand when you get the whole picture. Engineering-wise this is probably the biggest thing that ever happened to Con Chem."

"Engineering-wise?" I thought Ben would blow out the Vid tube. "Listen Marty, can you tell me in a nice, soft voice why we sent you to St. Louis?"

"To check on the sales situation. Ben, I've got the answer to that, but this is so much more——"

"He's got the answer to that," Ben mimicked. Needless to say I don't blame him. I would probably have talked the same way under similar circumstances. "Marty, it might interest you to know that we have got the answer to it, and it's what we're finalizing right now in Jim Howard's office. We are going to have a combined advertising and merchandising campaign in the St. Louis district the like of which has never been seen. Absolute saturation. The chips are down and we're going to fight!"

"Maybe you'd like me to switch you to Jim Howard so you can tell that to the whole meeting?"

I hardly need to add here that Ben was being highly sarcastic, since at that time I had never even been in Jim Howard's office, though today of course Jim and I are the best of friends and quite often play a round of golf together at Fellowship. In fact, if you are listening to this, Jim, hello!

I said, "It would save us a lot of money if you would, Ben. If you and Mr. Howard could hop a plane this afternoon and——"

"Marty!" I guess if I had told Ben to go home and shoot his dear old Mom he couldn't have reacted more, shock-wise.

He started to reach for the turn-off switch, so I had to talk fast. "Ben!" I almost hollered, "this may be the biggest thing in the world! It's bigger than television!"

"Ben, how would you like to drive a car at two hundred miles an hour—without leaving your house? How would you like to swim a hundred feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, this afternoon? I don't mean watch it on a screen, Ben, I mean——"

"Ben, how would you like to make love to a dozen beautiful girls on less electricity than it takes to make a piece of toast?"

Ben stopped yelling at me. He got very, very calm. It was like my Dad, in fact one of the few things I remember about him. When I was a little boy and used to have a tantrum I would lie down on the floor and kick and scream. Then my Dad would get very calm, so calm that it seemed louder than yelling. That was the way Ben was getting.

"Marty, listen to me. Just don't say anything at all, Marty. Listen. Try breathing very deeply, in and out. I know something happened to Van Cleve. It's not going to happen to you, Marty. Don't worry, boy. Now you do just what I say. You tell them to give you a room with a bath tub in it, I'll bet they've got one. Fill it up as high as you can with very hot water, and——"

"Of course you are, boy. Just lie in the hot water for an hour or so. Don't even think about business. We'll have somebody right there to take care of you."

He snapped off. My first impulse was to call him right back, but I realized that wouldn't be any good. He wouldn't talk to me. In fact, he'd probably tell Regina to keep talking to me, just to keep me in the room.

I tried to think what Ben would be doing, so I thought what would I do? I would probably put through a call to Harry Felker in the St. Louis office and tell him to get right over to the hotel. With a couple of husky men.

The first thing I thought of doing was catching a plane to New York. But by the time I got to the airport, spent an hour in flight, and got from the airport to the office, it would be after closing time, especially on Friday when all the top level people left about three.

I checked out of the hotel in Clayton and jumped right into a cab, carrying my brief-bag with me. As I pulled away from the curb I knew I was just in time. I saw another cab pull up and in it were Harry Felker and one other fellow. I wasn't sure, but I thought it was Jonesy, the one who had helped Harry pull me away from the Temple before. I pretended I was blowing my nose in order to hide my face, and they didn't see me.

I figured that would give me enough time to think about what I wanted to do. It was only coincidental that I was going in the direction of the Temple, though I am told that the subconscious mind is a very funny thing, motive-wise.

We kept going downtown until we were within walking distance of the Temple. I told the cabby to stop in front of an old hotel which looked fairly respectable, though not fancy. It was a building maybe sixty years old and about twelve stories high, the kind with all up-and-down lines, the way they used to build them in those days to make them look as high as possible.

I registered as Len Merkle so that it would fit with the monogram on my brief-bag, and an old bell boy took me by elevator to my room on the ninth floor.

I could tell especially by the room that this was no fleabag like the one Van Cleve was in. It had a Vid, a TV wall, a Wash-o-Robe, and a stainless-steel bath room, complete with a fairly recent model Bod-ee-Wash. It had all been modernized and even now had new plywood walls. It was in quite good taste.

When the bell boy left I went right to the Vid and called Artie Decker. It may occur to some of you that I was over-anxious to get to the Temple, but this was not the case. It was simply that I realized I had some free time, practically the whole afternoon, and in accordance with my principles I did not want to waste it.

"Whatsa matter, Marty, you can't make the date?" He was still in the sleeveless sweater, and even on the Vid I could see he was still sweating.

"I just wondered if I could come over now, since my plans have changed somewhat."

He gave me quite a leer and said, "It didn't take you long to clear the decks, did it, pal?"

After a few moments of kidding of this type he did agree that if I came right over he could, as he put it, "fix me up."

Artie's secretary, the little Irish girl with the pushed-up sweater sleeves, took me down to the basement of the office section. We walked along a corridor of doors.

"Here's a vacancy, Mr. Martin," she said, "step right in, please, Artie Decker will be with you in a moment." She started back.

I went in. There was just barely room for one of the reclining chairs. There were no windows at all, only a vent for the air conditioning. The walls were dark gray and the only light was a low-key indirect glow.

I took out two five hundreds and he jammed them into his pocket the way some people would a fifty. I realize that a thousand doesn't seem like much today, but back then it was almost a day's pay.

I found out later that this part of the "good work" so to speak was pretty much Artie's own private "good." Very little if any of it went to the Temple.

"Now," he said, "whatta you want to do? Go siding in the Alps, catch you a sailfish, or ride on a roller coaster?"

I looked at Artie, and I guess I must have looked kind of disappointed, not that I don't like any or most of the aforementioned activities, which I do for the most part. But it hardly seemed they would be a thorough test of the equipment.

"Ha, you shoulda seen the look on your kisser, Marty. Don't mind me, boy, I'm a great ladder. What I mean is, you like girls, don't you?"

"Well, uh——" It is very difficult at first to speak about this type of thing, at least until you get a little more used to it.

"Don't be bashful, Marty, or you're gonna be wastin' some of that grand. I mean I had a very liberal education the last few months, which is why we put in a few specialties. I started thumbin' through a written-book by this character Krafft-Ebing, and now I could write one of them books of my own, Marty. What I mean is, you like 'em tied up a little, or with a whip, or——"

"Look at a dozen or two of these slides," he said, "just to give you an idea of the range. Then ring for the boy and give him the number."

I looked through the pictures and, briefly, they were of all types, to suit practically any taste. There was one with a group of young ladies tied up in interesting positions, another one for men who preferred members of a similar sex, another with a slightly overweight girl who had a mean expression and a riding crop, and various types of girls, either one by one or in two's and three's, all of them with little or no clothing on, and largely in reclining positions.

There was one which seemed to portray a harem scene and I wrote that number down. This is not because I fancy myself a sultan or anything of that sort, but because it seemed that this would have quite a wide range, and of course I proved to be right.

I pushed a button and gave a boy the number, after which he brought in a reel and hooked it up on a built-in playback over my head. He turned the switch on and closed the door.

This time there was no dissolve from reality to the tape, the way there was in the Temple. It just came all of a sudden—bang!—like a flash of light, and there I was in what is so often referred to as the glamorous and romantic East.

Actually of course it was not the East at all, it was a stage setting, sort of, made to look like a harem scene. Up high in one wall was one of those little bulgy pointed windows of the sort you see in harem pictures, but it was made of canvas and shook a little now and then.

Well, there I was in those loose sultan-type pajamas and bedroom slippers, sitting on a pile of cushions. All around me were girls, six of them to be exact, three blondes, two brunettes, and one redhead, all dressed in practically transparent gauzy material.

Needless to say, these were not what you or I would call "nice" girls, or the type we would bring to Fellowship Club, all being "pros," but I had to admit they certainly were picked out with great care, all being really gorgeous looking, especially in their figures which were all definitely Miss America types only more so.

My eyes just roamed over them one by one, taking plenty of time on each one. I say "my" eyes, but as all of you who are familiar with XP knows—and who isn't these days?—they were really not my eyes, and actually I had no choice where they looked. There were times when I would have liked to linger over a well-turned thigh, say, and "my" eyes would drift up and hold on a pair of breasts, but all in all I had no actual complaint, as I think few of you would in a similar situation.

The girl who was sort of lying across my lap was one of the blondes, probably the most luscious of the whole lot, which I guess is why she was picked out to be across my lap.

She reached with a lazy motion to a rhinestone bowl in which was a pile of dates. Rhinestones, incidentally, were quite a favorite of Artie Decker's. Several of the girls had rhinestone G-strings, which could be seen quite clearly twinkling under their gauze pants.

"Have a date, Sulty?" the blonde asked me, ldnd of oozing herself to give the rhinestones an extra twinkle.

I reached for it with one hand, and with the other one I did something which made me personally, that is, kind of gasp at the boldness. I just pushed away some of the gauzy material and grabbed a hold of her. I won't say by what. She made no objections whatever, in fact quite the contrary.

I leaned forward and took a drag out of the water pipe which was sitting directly in front of me. I believe you know the type, which looks somewhat like an old-fashioned lamp without the shade and has a rubber tube for the smoke. It is technically called a "hooker" or something similar. Well, it had an awful taste, like burning rubber heels, and I noticed that I never took another drag out of it. It did keep on bubbling, though, for atmosphere, I guess. Artie had probably fixed it up with a hotplate underneath.

Meanwhile I heard off in the distance the sound of a flute playing that old Eastern melody which I know only as "The Dance They Do," though I am sure it has another title.

This was a cue for the redhead and one of the brunettes to stand up and start doing what I will refer to as a hootchie-kootchie dance, and a type not to be confused with anything that is seen on any stage except possibly in the hottest night spots in such cities as Las Vegas or Paris. They were directly in front of me and on some of their "bumps" I could have touched them, and in fact did on several occasions.

I don't need to tell you how I was reacting to this. In fact you have only to put yourselves in my shoes.

I might mention at this point that in spite of all the activity I couldn't help noticing an itch in my pants. This, as Artie Decker explained to me later, was the result of his getting a mosquito bite, and quite a bad one, on the night before the recording session. It was a sensation they were not able to get out of the tape later.

Nowadays of course we have ways of erasing things like this electronically, or at least in the case of an itch, scratching them. But these were the "pioneer" days.

I might mention at this point there was a large plump colored fellow on hand, dressed in nothing but baggy pants and wearing land of a turban. He had a fan which he waved around. I guessed he was supposed to be a eunuch, a regular feature of harems I understand, though frankly to me he seemed to be taking more of an interest in the goings-on than would be the case with a genuine one.

"How about some nice cool wine, Sulty?" the blonde asked, right at the time when the hootchie-kootchie dancers were really going at it in a big way.

"Sure," I said. She started twirling a bottle which was sitting in a bucket of ice cubes. I clapped my hands and the colored fellow came up and opened the bottle. It was an imported sparkling burgundy, and one that I imagine was quite expensive. The girl poured me a large rhinestone goblet full of it.

I sat back on the cushions drinking the wine, which tasted quite good, though a trifle too sweet. I watched the dancers and clapped my hands a couple of times to pep them up. All this time the luscious blonde was sort of cuddling all over me.

"I'm mad for you, Sulty, simply mad for you," she said. "I want you to love me, honey."

Every time I put my hand on her, instead of shrinking away as girls so often do, she just sort of oozed toward me, as though she was getting a real bang out of it.

It was about this time when I must confess I completely forgot about Con Chem, something I rarely do, and have not done too often since.

While I was leaning over her I looked into her eyes which were a beautiful blue and saw "myself" mirrored in them. What I actually saw was Artie Decker's face. On his head was quite a large piece of apparatus, the now familiar recording instrument, though this was a good deal larger and clumsier than today's models. I must say that they had it well counterbalanced. I could hardly feel it at all, and it surely did not restrict my activity as I was soon to prove.

Artie told me later that he himself made a good many of the special private tapes that we would call "pornographic" today. This was because, as he explained it, he "had a very great capacity for enjoyment." I have to go along with him there, though it is certainly not what you or I would call a very high type of enjoyment.

Well, to make a long story short, not long after I saw "myself" in the blonde's eyes, I clapped my hands three times and made a kind of sweeping gesture. The colored fellow closed the canopy and I was all alone with the blonde and the cushions.

At this point the blonde really "took off the wraps," both in a manner of speaking and actually, you might say. She had a body which was as soft as Cashlon and also very bendable and graceful, like a dancer's, which I believe she was. What I am trying to say is that when it came to picking women Artie really spared no expense.

The chips were certainly down, in a manner of speaking, and for a second I felt personally quite embarrassed. It was just for a second, however, as things happened very rapidly.

Needless to say, I think I had better draw a curtain at this point if you will forgive me, and I am not sure all of you will, for a period of perhaps ten minutes or perhaps as much as an hour. I do not know exactly as I did not look at a watch, nor had any desire to do so. Or any opportunity, I might say.

Let me add, however, that technically, as far as actual sensations go, even that very early XP was perfectly realistic. If you had been there in person you would not have felt any different, except, as I tried to explain before, the sensations were actually much more so because at certain times they turned the volume up to double or maybe triple. There is no way I know of to describe this.

I mentioned earlier that these were genuine orgies, and that was really the case. The part with the blonde, as much so as it was, was only the beginning.

At the end of her part they had made a cut in the tape. It just seemed like a quick flash of light and there I was sitting on the cushions again feeling as though I had had a hot shower, a rubdown and a rest, which is what Artie Decker actually had. That, I don't have to point out, is another of the tremendous advantages of XP, that you can leave out parts and start up again at any point, just like in a video-tape.

Well, the blonde was there, but this time around she was sitting off with the other girls and just looking at me from time to time with quite a loving expression, the result no doubt of what had just happened. She looked slicked-up also, a great improvement over the way she had looked when I saw her last, when she had a definitely pawed-over appearance.

One of the brunettes, the one who had been doing the hootchie-kootchie dance, was kind of lying across my lap and I wondered if she was next I have always been curious how a Sultan actually does decide things like this and still keep peace in the family. They have probably got some kind of a system.

Suddenly the door opened and in came the big colored fellow dragging a girl behind him. She wasn't dressed in harem clothes, but in an extremely slinky rhinestone evening gown with no shoulder straps. She had on fancy jewels and a white Newlon ermine cape. Her hair was reddish-blonde and her face was really beautiful, with a kind of snooty, sneering expression on it. She looked like a show girl, the type that doesn't have to dance or do anything else except stand around and look gorgeous. I was to discover later that this was the case, though she did not seem to mind doing other types of work on the side, if highly enough paid for it.

There was a rope around her wrists and the colored fellow hauled her up in front of me.

"Mmmmmm," I went, giving her the eye and land of sneering back at her. As you can see, it was all part of a script, so to speak. At the time it did not occur to me to question what she was doing on the desert dressed in that manner.

It was pretty clear from her reading that Artie had not picked her for her acting talent, but only for her more obvious advantages. I thought the dialogue was pretty fair, though.

"You want to keep her, boss, as part of the group, or shall I toss her to the dogs?"

I reached for a date and nibbled at it in a sort of la-de-dah manner if you follow me, and then tossed off a rhinestone goblet of wine.

"Well," I said, "she has an interesting little face. Anything else? Peel her, Sam." I clapped my hands.

"Oh, don't, I beg you or you will hear from my father the king," she said in about the same tone you or I would use to say "Pass the sugar."

Sam yanked off the cape and unzipped the gown, which left her standing there in just a sheer bra, panties, stockings, and evening slippers. Her legs were even better than Harriet's. I was glad to hear myself say, "Hmmmm, she might be worth keeping a few days. Toss her to me, Sam."

He tossed her at my feet where she cringed, though it was not the most convincing cringe I have ever seen. I pushed away the brunette and took hold of the new girl, gently, but firmly.

"We want to be alone," I said, clapping my hands. Sam pulled the canopy and this time I have to admit I was considerably less embarrassed than previously, which proves that the modern business man is certainly adaptable.

This one was more in the nature of romantic love, in which I made most of the advances. However, in a short time the girl forgot she was supposed to be a princess. She did not have the training the other girl had, but "I" certainly made her jump through the hoops, to coin a phrase.

In short, Artie really knew how to get the most out of women. This brought out to me clearly how educational XP can become, if used of course for good and worthwhile purposes, such as teaching golf strokes and things of that nature.

Frankly, at this point I am sure that a great percentage of people would have said they had their thousand dollars' worth. In fact I would have been happy to stop except that for business reasons I wanted to see the full range of the tape.

No one could have been more surprised than I to have the lights flash again and find that it was starting all over. The harem room was now very dimly lit and I was stretched out on the cushions. I was being made love to, very gradually, by not one but three girls at the same time. You might say it was a team operation because they did not get in each other's way.

It is something I would prefer not to go into here not only because nothing would be gained by it, but because it would take considerable literary skill to describe it. Let me say only that it is something one has to experience in order to believe it.

When I look back on experiences of this kind I see what a real contribution Con Chem has made in cleaning up what might surely have become a serious moral problem.

I heard a flapping noise which was the tape coming to the end of the reel, and then I was sitting in the reclining chair in the little room. The Experience was over.

For some time, probably as long as twenty minutes, no one came around, and for some reason it did not seem to matter. I was quite content just to sit there.

A boy opened the door finally and unhooked the head belt. "Was it okay?" he said.

He took me by both hands and helped me out of the chair. Then he linked his arm in mine and started to help me down the hall.

"Sure you are." But he kept holding me until we got up the stairs to the ground floor. "Can you make it?" he said.

"Of course I can." I was really quite all right. I stopped by the desk of the Irish girl, Artie Decker's secretary. She almost laughed at me, though I wasn't aware that there was anything particularly humorous about my appearance.

I asked her where Artie Decker was and she said he had gone to the studio. He was making another tape. I guessed it must have been quite a life.

I walked out of the building and started to cross the street to get to the opposite corner and pick up a cab. I heard a terrible shriek of brakes and a car stopped just a few inches from me. The driver, no doubt not looking where he was going, leaned out and holler, "You tryin' to kill yourself, ya goddam Follower?"

"Hello, Lanny-boy!" It was Harry Felker, as I might have suspected. "You oughta be more careful, you'll get run over."

"I want you to understand, Lanny-boy, that this is definitely contrary to the rules of the Ex-Followers-Anonymous."

"We never go after 'em, they have to come to us. We're acting only because we were contacted by Headquarters."

"There's nothing wrong with me, Harry," I said. I was quite cheerful and rational. In fact, at the moment I was humming a waltz. "Da-DAH-de-dah!" I went.

"It's just that there was a misunderstanding with Ben Burry at Headquarters. He called me up from Port Washington. He was mighty worried about you, Lanny-boy. He must think a lot of you."

"It's all these stories about St. Louis. I guess maybe he thought it was happening to you what happened to Van Cleve. I told him I'd just seen you and he must be mistaken. I told him you were one hundred per cent okay."

"Clayton Athletic Club," Harry told the driver. "Know what we're gonna do, Lanny-boy? We're gonna get you a nice shower and a rubdown. Then we'll have a couple of drinks and a good dinner. We've got a ticket for you on the 10:30 plane. Where's your bag, Lanny-boy?"

I figured they really had me surrounded so I told them the address of my new hotel. Harry told the cabby to stop there.

"I'm mighty glad you're seein' things our way, boy," said Harry. "You sure won't be sorry."

"That's right," said Jonesy in a soothing voice. For a second Jonesy got sort of a faraway look in his eye and said, "So you had one of the special tapes, huh?"

"Take my advice, Lanny-boy. Get a good night's sleep in your own bed. Then hop over bright and early to the Club. Have a nice, hard work-out and show 'em all you're normal as hell."

"Sure you are, boy, sure you are. But just be a little careful how you talk, huh?"

It was only a brief-bag which you could carry in one hand, but they went in on both sides of me, and I noticed they had a firm grip on each arm.

Next morning I was glad I had taken Harry's advice. The early plane had landed in New York before midnight, and I was home in time to kiss Mom good-night.

I checked in at the Fellowship Club parking lot at 10:30 a.m. on the dot, Saturday morning. Mom would have joined me, except that she had sprained her ankle on Thursday getting out of the MG.

A lot of the other fellows were trying to get in under the wire at 10:30, too. I put my steel tag into the meter right away to register I was there on time.

Needless to say, we weren't actually penalized in those days for being late at Fellowship on Saturdays and Sundays, any more than we are today. However, it certainly indicates a fellow isn't much of a "mixer," and the records are kept because of that only.

In fact, even as it is now, Fellowship Club was a privilege, run by Con Chern for our own good, and almost entirely at Company expense. Where else can you find thirty-six holes of golf, a really fine swimming pool, and all the rest, for a dollar a year? Surely no place. And I can say for my own part that it has certainly helped me to cement friendships in the Company as in no other manner.

On my way in to the clubhouse I ran into Kenny Ralston, Joe Sand's assistant, getting out of his car, a last year's Chevrolet, the semi-de luxe model. Kenny was coming along in the Company, however, and I know he'd soon be ready for a small Buick without creating any offense to anyone.

"I'd like you to meet my fiancée, Grace Ernest. Grace, this is Mr. Martin, one of the top men in our division." This needless to say was certainly not true at that time, though I guess to a fellow of his rank I did seem fairly "top."

She said hello. She seemed quite a pretty girl with soft brown hair and a fine figure, though somehow she did not seem like the "Con Chem type." I suppose all of you will know what I mean by that, though it is hard to put down in so many words. Maybe it is just the idea of being part of the "Con Chem Family," all of us working together and kind of thinking together.

"Well, I'm trying to learn," she said. I remembered then who it was she reminded me of, a girl I once knew who was quite standoffish and spent day after day doing nothing but reading.

"She's learning fast," said Kenny, trying to make her look good, I guess. She certainly acted nervous, and as I was to discover, with some reason, since she was scheduled to meet Mrs. Jim Howard that day.

I guess all of you fellows who have brought your gals up for "inspection" by Mrs. Jim know what both of these kids were going through. All of us know, however, that if you have the right kind of gal there's certainly nothing to worry about, and surely nobody can be more gracious than Mrs. Jim. The part she has played in making Con Chem the kind of company that can really live together just cannot be exaggerated.

I went straight to the locker room, which even in those days must have covered almost an acre. We kept the old term "locker room," though actually everyone over the rank of assistant brand man had his own dressing room with Wash-O-Robe and Bod-ee-Wash. They were cleverly designed with low partitions, though, so you could see and talk to the other fellows. This way we kept up the easy camaraderie which is one of the main purposes of Fellowship Club.

First I checked the bulletin board and discovered that our division was having a couple of informal "get-to-gethers," a product review at three in Rumpus Room Four of the Nineteenth Hole, and a Marketing Strategy cocktail party at 5:30 in Alcove J of the Main Lounge.

There were three get-togethers scheduled for Sunday, too. I figured it should be an interesting and mighty valuable week end for all of us.

There was a special announcement gotten out by the Entertainment Committee about a Momsday Corner-Trimming Party for that evening, followed by a dance.

As I was standing there, Ben Burry came up right alongside me. He put his hand on my arm very gently.

I'd already thought out exactly what I was going to say to Ben, and I'd already primed Harry Felker to back up my story.

"Gosh, Ben," I said, "I'm practically embarrassed to see you today after yesterday. What a lunch! I guess I musta talked to you right after, huh?"

"Went out with Harry and a couple of distributors, and being Friday and all, I guess we probably tied on a few too many ever-loving martinis. We did a lot of good, though, Ben, they were eating out of our hands. You know, I hardly even know what I said to you?"

"Frankly, Ben, I was enthusiastic, but I didn't mean to sound punchy." We walked to our dressing rooms, which unfortunately were not adjoining, so we had to snap our Vids on.

I could see Ben taking off his tweed jacket and gray flannel slacks and getting into his Cashlon jersey golf shirt and his Cashlon walking shorts. Of course I was doing the same.

The psychology boys say there is something kind of intimate about fellows getting undressed together which makes for a more informal and frank approach to each other. I don't know how true that is, but I do know that some of our closest agreements have been reached at Fellowship, and quite a lot of them right in the locker room.

"You shoulda heard yourself, Marty," Ben said. He was always a sight in his underwear, being rather pudgy. "You were yapping about making love to dames with electricity."

"No kidding?" I knew I had to go easy and lead up to it slowly. As we all know too well, there are plenty of fellows in corporation management who go off the deep end, what with our tensions and all, in spite of our ample opportunities to relax, and in the finest surroundings. I certainly didn't want Ben to think I was one of them.

"Goddamdest lot of crap I ever heard," he said. Our talk always got a little more "salty" in the locker room in those days, even as it does now. "You were laying those dames by alternating current, boy!"

"It was direct current, Ben, but direct!" We laughed. "Boy, I musta been fried all right."

"Which reminds me, Marty of the story of the newly married guy and the electric bedmaker. See, it's their wedding night, and the two of them go up to bed——"

Ben went on and told the story which I guess all of you have heard as it is something of a classic by this time. Just repeating the tag line, "But honey, I'm over here," is enough to get a laugh in the locker room today.

I practically broke my gut, if I may say so, on the story, and then I looked up right into the Vid lens, which I knew would be like looking straight into Ben's eyes and I said, "All kidding aside, Ben, this gadget is the gahdamdest thing merchandising-wise that ever came down the pike. It'll make up for our losses in St. Louis a hundred times over."

"It hurts in your brain." I started to give Ben a quick once-over-lightly treatment the way Mrs. Schroeder and Walsh gave it to me, though it is possible I mixed up the technical part.

"Does it really work?" Ben said, right to me, since by this time we were dressed and walking out to the first tee.

"We could start it rolling," said Ben. "We'll have to send it through channels, of course. First I feel our group should talk to the proposition for a meeting-series and submit it for recommendation at brand level. Maybe before that we'd want to tee off with a series of blind tests and motivation studies and at least a pilot group of depth interviews."

"Well, no. I'd estimate if we don't get into any hassles—which could happen of course—we might be able to submit at brand level by early ninety-four."

"Of course it's possible Engineering and Product Design might lift a leg over the whole proposition at that point."

"Couldn't we take a chance this once and submit now to Engineering and Product Design?"

Ben just stopped and looked at me. "Marty," he said, "that's mighty dangerous talk."

I might add here, Ben, if you're listening to this memo, that I am not criticizing your actions. Your decision for a man in your position was perfectly right, and without an actual demonstration of the machine it was what I imagine I myself would have done.

Well, we walked over to the tee and picked up Joe Sand and one of the Motivation Research boys. I always got a laugh when I saw Joe in his golf shorts, since Joe is about six feet four and about a foot wide. I don't know whether it was just because his face is so long and thin, but Joe always had a sad look. Some people always look like they had a bad night last night, and there are two types of these, the kind that look like it was worth it and the ones who are sorry. Joe always looked like he was sorry.

Actually we did make a foursome, since all of us played pretty closely in both golf and bridge.

I guess many of you young fellows are all spoiled with XP these days, but I'm one of the old-timers that likes to get out there and bang 'em around, in the flesh.

We stepped up and swatted our drives, all four of us, then we jumped aboard the bridge wagon, where the first hand was already dealt and waiting. The driver started up, and the wagon moved down the fairway where, incidentally, it did the grass a lot of good.

For those of you who are so young or stay indoors so much that you have never seen a bridge wagon, I might add they are made with rollers instead of wheels, and inside they are quite comfortable, with plenty of room for golf bags and a table of bridge. Some of the large models hold two full tables.

By the time the wagon reached our balls Ben had bid four hearts and we'd already taken three tricks. It certainly looked like we were going to clobber them.

"Marty," said Ben, "I think this would be a good time to noodle around that proposition on the coupon pack in the test markets." He paused while I swung the club. It is considered bad course etiquette to discuss business while the golf club is actually moving, and rightly so. "Personally," he went on, "I get quite a lot of nourishment out of it."

We decided to rough it and walk to the green. We told the driver to meet us at the second tee. There was no harm in working up a little good old sweat, something a lot of you young fellows fail to realize.

We played the full eighteen and practically a whole rubber. But all that time Ben never once mentioned the XP gadget. I thought at first he had forgotten it, but I discovered later he was just being cagey.

As a matter of fact nothing was said the remainder of the day on the subject of the XP machine, and I was really beginning to think nothing at all might happen on it.

Little did I know that it was on this very evening that the famous "episode of the cow" would take place, a part of our story that I guess every one of you has heard me tell at sales meetings and similar get-togethers. For the sake of completeness I will re-tell it and hope there are one or two of you who are hearing it for the first time, and if not, that you may get another smile out of it, even in this case without gestures, which do improve it.

In any case, there is no doubt about the important part it played in the start of XP at Con Chem, in spite of the "humor" of the situation.

Well, it was after dinner that I "played hookey" you might say from the Momsday Corner-Trimming party. A lot of the fellows in Ben's group had eaten together, and, in fact, we had made some mighty interesting talk on Marketing Strategy, which we had begun earlier at the M.S. cocktail party.

As usual, the women folk were sitting at another table where they could carry on their "children talk" as they called it. I might add that the dinner was excellent, as usual at Fellowship, and cost us in those days only ten dollars apiece, though it was certainly better than any fifty- or sixty-dollar one that could be bought anywhere on Long Island, and in better surroundings. To say nothing of the excellent companions!

As I left the table on my way out to the parking lot, I ran into Mrs. Jim Howard, known to everyone then as she is today as just plain "Mrs. Jim." She looked just the same then as she does now, the same plain-folks land of look, the same nice white hair, and the same gracious smile.

In fact I guess Mrs. Jim was—and still is!—the most gracious person I ever met, and certainly the most devoted person to Con Chem that ever lived. She said to me once, "I guess I never have a thought outside the Company, or outside the Company-Family, anyway." To Mrs. Jim the "Company-Family" means not only just we fellows, but our wives and children as well.

And though of course we all give Jim Howard full credit for getting where he is today, he is the first to admit (as he has to me on numerous occasions) that if it wasn't for Mrs. Jim standing right beside him he sure would have had a harder time of it.

"And how are you, Lanny Martin!" she said to me, with so much graciousness you could practically grab ahold of it. "And how is your dear sweet Mom?" Mrs. Jim always asked me about Mom, and this always made me feel warm inside.

"That's nice," she said, though of course she didn't mean it, she was just looking at another fellow coming up and I guess was trying to think whether she should ask him about his wife or his mother. Even for her, being so gracious was no doubt quite a strain at times.

I said I would and then ducked for the side door. It certainly wasn't that I was glad to get away from Mrs. Jim, which I wasn't, only that I didn't want to call attention to the fact that I was leaving.

I walked to the parking lot, and on the way to my car I heard a sound like crying coming from the last year's Chevrolet. I realized it was Kenny Ralston's car, and both Kenny and his fiancée were in it. The girl was the one who was crying. Needless to say, I did not interrupt them then, but I guessed she had not exactly passed the "inspection" by Mrs. Jim and I heard later from Kenny that this was the case.

Luckily now Kenny can talk about it, and even joke about it, as he is a fine adaptable type, and I am happy to say is coming along well at Con Chem. Actually all Mrs. Jim had said to Kenny in her gracious way was, "She is such a darling, Kenny, so utterly different from the wives we see around Fellowship. I wouldn't be at all surprised if she married some professor, or something, some day."

As all of you know, Kenny later found a really swell girl, and though she may not be quite the "looker" that the first one was, she's definitely a Con Chem regular, and they now have at least one fine kid, or maybe it's two. Kenny has said to me since, "I sure can thank Mrs. Jim for setting me right on Grace. She never would have fit in."

Well, it was land of good that a thing like this happened that evening, because I was on my way to get Harriet for a date, and it made me realize even more that Harriet would never pass inspection with Mrs. Jim.

I got in my car and drove out through the gates of Fellowship Club, feeling as I always do when driving out, that warm glow of fellowship which is always associated with the place.

It was quite late at night when Harriet and I parted the car. The spot I picked was certainly a beautiful one, overlooking the water of Huntington Harbor. Even to this day Ben Burry kids me about parking there, claiming that I knew whose property it was. His story is that I was deliberately trying to make a short cut through company channels. Actually there is no truth to that at all, unless it was all done somehow by my subconscious mind, which I certainly doubt.

Surely what happened later with the cow was a pure accident and no one can ever suggest that it was not.

Well, Harriet and I were lying back under the astrodome of the Buick and gazing up at the stars, to say nothing of the constellation PEPSI COLA. We could hear the soft music and catchy jingles on the radio and we could smell the new-cut grass and the salt water. Next to me I could feel Harriet's thigh, soft and warm and quite well put together.

There are times, aren't there, when one is practically carried away by the wonderland of nature, and this was one of them.

I leaned across and kissed her, counting to seven as I did so, from force of habit. I got to nine and nothing happened except that she put her arm around me. At thirty-six I came up for breath.

"I don't know," I told her, but before I could go any farther she pulled me down again.

As I look back on it now I have at least an idea what happened. It was not all just the educational influence of the XP in St. Louis the day before, though I realize that it was a powerful factor. There is no question that one learns by doing, and I surely had considerable doing on that Friday.

However, I think it was something more, too. You might say that I really had it the day before, which meant that I was not so overanxious as in the past. The fact was that I did not particularly care what happened with Harriet that evening, and I can only assume that she sensed the fact. This is why I often advise young fellows they will do better with girls if they relax and don't take such an overanxious attitude. You will find that it works quite well.

I'd like to remind all of you at this point that it was Saturday night, and even the Company Psych boys kind of wink at not "thinking of Katie first" as we say, on this night. All in all, as I'm sure you have all found, Con Chem is mighty reasonable, and the meetings at Fellowship on Sundays are practically informal and do not require the sharpness that the weekday ones do.

Well, things went along so rapidly that I decided I had better take precautions.

I handed her a pink, heart-shaped pill with "I LOVE YOU" stamped on one side and "AMBISKO" on the other, because they were made by a subsidiary of the American Biscuit Company, makers of famous Fig Newlies.

I broke it in half along the groove and we chewed up the halves together. They had a taste like peppermint and they were sold, it said on the package, "for the prevention of disease only." They did, too. You couldn't even get a cold after you took one. But everybody knew disease wasn't all they prevented. You had to get them in New Jersey because New York had a law.

"I like the cinnamon better," she said, and realized she had made a slight slip. "I mean, I like the flavor of cinnamon better than peppermint." There are only two kinds, peppermint and cinnamon. The licorice one never caught on.

Everybody knew, however, that two halves wouldn't hurt you. In fact, I knew a girl who ate a whole package once, all twenty-four, and only got a case of hiccups. She didn't get a cold for six months. She had a baby later, too, but not on that time, of course.

Ordinarily I would not discuss what followed since it was of a highly personal nature. And as I have already hinted, I believe, Harriet's name is the only one in the entire report which I have "made up," for obvious reasons.

About the time things were getting very highly personal, Harriet heard the mooing of a cow.

There were mighty few things I had less interest in at that moment than a cow, a fact which I imagine all of you can understand.

"I'm afraid," Harriet said, sitting up. Her breasts looked very full and round in the moonlight. She pulled the zipper and they were covered up again.

The brush right alongside the car snapped and I looked right up into a cow's face, just over the astrodome. It seemed to me like a fairly nice cow, though in that light you couldn't be sure. It didn't particularly worry me.

Everything happened so fast then that even to this day I am not entirely sure what happened. Harriet's leg, I think, came up and hit the starter key, which sent up the power antenna and brought in a hundred kilowatts from Con Edison's Glenwood Landing plant. I reached for the key and must have hit the hood release, just at the time the cow swung around, probably in a panic.

There was a flash like a ten-foot bolt of lightning, the sound of an exploded moo, another scream from Harriet, and the smell of burning hair and charred insulation. I snapped off the starter key, but it was too late.

Lights turned on in the big house. I could see them through the trees. Dogs started barking, and there were several other moos.

I might add that though this was the last I saw of Harriet that night because of forces beyond my control, it was not the last I saw of her, far from it. We had numerous dates on other occasions and very satisfying ones, also. However, I did realize more than ever that she would not pass Mrs. Jim's "inspection," and I long since gave her up as a "future Mrs. Martin."

A minute after Harriet disappeared around the turn, the man from the big house came up. He was wearing a tweed jacket and carrying a flashlight. When he got closer I could tell he had been drinking Scotch.

It is too bad I don't have gestures now to tell this, the way I have done at several of the sales meetings, but you will just have to imagine them now.

"I'll pay," I said again, wondering where Harriet had gone, and how I could find her.

"Isn't the money. Only keep 'em for deductions. One time a cow got struck by lightning. Saved me seventy-eight dollars and fifty cents."

"Don't understand it. Wonderful tax man. Regular wizard. Probably owe you a drink."

He was flashing his light around. He held it for a moment on a spot in the soft earth where you could see the prints of Harriet's spike heels. I stepped on them and we looked at each other in what I guess you might describe as a man-to-man glance.

We walked up toward the house, and it was only when we went through the gate to the front yard that I saw the sign "T. J. BLAKEMAN."

"Are you Mr. Tom Blakeman?" I asked, realizing then that I had certainly seen him around Fellowship.

I scarcely need to tell you that Tom Blakeman was, and still is, in fact, the head of our Engineering and Product Design division.

It was then, of course, that I introduced myself and revealed that I also was a Con Chem man. He said as long as somebody had to kill his cow he was glad it was a guy from Con Chem, which I thought was a nice attitude to take.

We went into the big house, one of the new aluminum colonials, with simulated clapboard siding. I remember seeing WEAREVER at the end of one plank as we went in the door.

"Is everything all right, Tom?" said a voice from upstairs. This was Mrs. Madeline Blakeman, a very gracious person whom I was to get to know a great deal better later on.

"Sure," he said, "go back to bed, Madeline." He turned to me and said, "In case you're worried about, uh, anybody else, there's a bus stop right around the bend in the road."

I called a garage and the man said it would be half an hour before a repair truck could get out This actually proved to be more than an hour.

"Wouldn't think of it," he said, leading me into the living room. "Sit down and have a drink."

I finally agreed to do so. We sat down and he poured me out quite a strong Scotch. I make a point of this because actually it was not my intention to say anything at all about my experiences in St. Louis.

It was toward the end of the second Scotch that the conversation turned to the situation in St. Louis.

I turned my glass around slowly, looked him straight in the eye and said, "When you prick your finger, what happens?"

"Hurts," he said, and gave me a very strange look, for which I could hardly blame him in the circumstances.

I kept right on going, all the way through my experiences with the special tapes.

He sat there for awhile without saying anything. Finally he looked up at me. "Tomorrow's Sunday," he said. "Think you could arrange a demonstration?"

When Ben Burry kids me about my actions on this night he always says, "He not only went straight to Engineering and Product Design—he spent the night there!" This of course is true, but only—as Ben really knows—because they had to take my car to the garage to install a new power intake.

The Blakemans were good enough to let me use a spare room, of which they had several, since their three grown boys were away at school.

From my room I called Harriet's house, figuring by this time she would have reached home.

Her Mom answered, at least I assume it was her Mom because of the green Newlon lounging pajamas with the orange monogram. In front of her face she was holding "cheaters" on a stick, like a lorgnette. In case you are too young to remember "cheaters," they were sort of false faces with very pert, cute expressions and just holes for the eyes and mouth. People kept them close to their Vids. The ones Mommy Halpern had in front of her face had a little poem printed across them:

They were quite an item and were made by one of Con Chem's subsidiaries. Several million were sold in all.

"My daughter has retired," she said, very formal. "She does not wish to be disturbed."

"I'm sure she has nothing further to communicate with you. Good evening." She flashed off.

I gathered from this that Harriet was all right, though somewhat peeved at me. This proved more or less to be true, though it was mostly her Mom who was really angry, not Harriet.

It was one-thirty when Tom Blakeman and I landed at St. Louis, and about two when we reached the office building next to the Temple. Artie Decker was there. In fact, he had been there at 10:30 in the morning when I put through a Vid call from the Blakeman house. As far as I could tell, Artie worked practically all the time, though part of this might not be considered actually work.

"Hiya," said Artie, sitting in his office in the same sleeveless sweater. When he shook hands his palm was soaking wet, as before. "You're sure in luck. I just got back prints of the tape I made personally in Rome, Italy. This one is loaded with high-type scenery."

"Maybe," I said, "a scenery one wouldn't exactly demonstrate what the machine will do."

Needless to say, I was thinking of the technical side of the problem, and of ways to involve the maximum number of senses, for the benefit of Tom Blakeman.

I looked at Tom. Naturally he was quite sober, not that he was intoxicated or anything the night before, but he had been drinking, as so many of us do on Saturday night.

He stood there, quite tall with his curly red hair which was about half gray, a big man with wide shoulders and kind of a dead-pan expression, common to so many engineers. I could tell that he didn't really believe any of it in the cold light of day. In fact he later told me if it turned out to be only ten per cent true it was worth a quick flight to St. Louis. "Let's try it," he said.

Artie took us into two adjoining booths downstairs, each one exactly like the one I'd been in before. He racked us up himself, but not before he had slugged us for a thousand dollars apiece. The tape machine was in my compartment with an extension running to Blake-man's headset.

"Suit yourself," said Artie, "but take it from me, Mac, it don't mean a thing. Two miles away and you feel it just as good."

So we changed places and Artie turned on the tape. This one was really something. It made the tape I'd had the Friday before look like amateur night. Believe it or not, this one was historical. It was made in Rome, as Artie said, and Artie was dressed up like a Roman in an old time Roman toga and gold sandals. It felt very comfortable to me.

The setting was a real Roman palace made out of marble, which they had no doubt rented for the day. "I" was lying on a couch having a feast and scooping up a bowl of wine from time to time out of a wine fountain alongside. The whole fountain was full of sweet Italian-type champagne, no doubt gallons and gallons of it.

The food was quite good, with about twenty courses, including antipasto, spaghetti, and some very tasty pizza pies. I have learned since that these are not exactly the right dishes for ancient Rome, being more typical of Rome as it is today (or at least was before our food mixes caught on) but they were certainly tasty. In fact I never ate better food. Everything was brought in by slaves, of which there were at least half a dozen, so the service was excellent.

Three of the slaves were extremely beautiful young Italian girls of perhaps eighteen or so. Since this was one of Artie's tapes, I hardly need to add what they were there for. In fact, I grabbed the first one between the antipasto and the minestrone, which put off the rest of the meal for quite a while.

I had another one after the lobster. You had to hand it to Artie, he certainly knew how to enjoy himself.

After we had gone through three girls and the twenty courses, there was kind of a dissolve and we were outside. It was like an intermission, almost to "work up an appetite" again, though actually with a tape, as all of you know, it is possible to eat all day since you do not really get full, and this of course applies to practically everything. I asked Artie later once why he always had girls in batches of three and he said he believed in moderation.

Well, the tape ran for a while with us outside in modern dress, first in swimming at the Lido at Venice, and then doing some water skiing. This last one was not made with Artie in the skis, you could tell by the hands, but with somebody who was quite an expert water skier. Just to show you what I mean by the educational benefits of this, I had never done water skiing before, and later that summer I tried it and did it the first time.

After that "I" drove a sports car, a Lancia I believe, on a spin through the Italian Alps. It was certainly a fine experience, though personally I will stick to my Buick which is far roomier.

Then we were back being ancient Romans again. I don't know how long the second main experience would have run because almost at the very beginning, when I was just lighting into a big dish of antipasto, the tape flashed off and I was just sitting in the reclining chair with my mouth watering.

I waited five or ten minutes or so for it to start again. It never did. Tom Blakeman came barging into my booth.

"It's sensational. I want to see the recording system. This part is very simple."

I followed him into his booth, and I could see why he wanted to have the playback machine in there. He already had it all apart, and the only tools he used were some little pocket wrenches and a screwdriver.

"Hell," he said, "these are as simple as a radio. We could turn 'em out for a hundred bucks apiece. In million lots, that is."

While I watched, in just a few minutes, he fitted it together. Then we went upstairs to find Artie. We saw him walking down the hall.

"It was," said Blakeman. "I'm interested in the technical side. Will you let me see the recording equipment?"

"I'll do better than that," said Artie. "I'll take you to the studio. At the present moment we got a production shooting. You want to go right on the set?"

We said we did, and Artie took us a couple of blocks down town to an old building made of dirty yellow brick. It had probably been a garage once, you could tell by the big doors. These I guessed were handy for bringing in sets. As we walked in, a very good-looking girl in make-up came out the door.

I felt that I knew her very well, and then I realized she had been the "princess" in the harem scene. Naturally she didn't recognize me, though it certainly seemed strange after all we had been through together. I noticed though that she seemed to regard Artie quite fondly.

Inside, the place looked like a television warehouse. There were big painted flats stacked around, and piles of props all over.

Up ahead we could see they were "shooting." Lights were on, a set was up, and men in coveralls were standing around.

The set was open in the back. It was a temple and in it I saw several plaster of Paris Buddhas. The only person on the set was a small skinny man with a dark-tan complexion. He was wearing a double-breasted green suit and squatting on the floor with his legs crossed like a tailor. He had on a headpiece made of a lot of coils and tubes, and a wire running off in back of him.

"We are trying," said Artie, "to record a mystical type experience. This guy here is Solly Vishna, from Los Angeles. The William Morris agency says he's the best mystic in town."

We looked around the other side of the set and we could see engineers sitting in front of control boards with headsets on.

"No dice, huh? I got the best crystal ball in St. Louis. It cost a thousand bucks, just to rent it."

"It's no trouble. IATSE sent a man over, just to heat up the coals. We got to pay him anyway. He can't do a thing else, it's the union."

A fellow in a flannel shirt stuck his head out from behind a flat. "I can make fires in fireplaces," he said. "You got a fireplace?"

"We still got a snake we ain't tried yet, Artie," said a man who was standing over by a wicker basket.

"A genuine cobra type." He reached in the basket and pulled out a snake. It certainly looked like a cobra. It had a big flat head and a mean expression.

"Okay, set up the snake," said Artie. He turned to Blakeman and me. "Like I say, it's strictly experimental. The pitch is this. Some guys get a real charge outa this mystic stuff. It has got things sex has not got, so they say, though you will have to prove this to me. What can we lose?"

Blakeman was talking to one of the engineers. "If you can send it over a wire," he said, "why can't you broadcast it?"

"Television is free," said Blakeman. "You got one of these recorders you're not using?"

Blakeman sat down alongside it and took off the cover. He poked around inside it for some time while they were getting the snake ready.

"There's a lot of stuff we haven't even touched the surface of yet," Artie told me. "You take the joy of creation."

"Creation. Like a genius. A guy that creates something strictly out of his head, like a real fine comic book in 3D, for example, a bestseller. I am told there is real ecstasy involved here."

"Uh-huh. So why not put it on tape, then everybody gets this charge without movin' a muscle. Maybe it'd sell, huh?"

"We took one whack at it, paid a television script writer, a real fine artist making twenty thousand a week, to sit down and create."

"He banged out a couple pages, but frankly I didn't get much out of the tape, just some fairly lousy two-finger typewriting and a slight pain in the stomach. I figure we still got some technical bugs to iron out."

Blakeman came over to Artie. "You mind if we take some equipment back to New York?"

Artie gave us a big smile, just to show he didn't have any hard feelings. "We gotta protect ourselves, right? I bet in a coupla weeks your lawyers and my lawyers will work out a real swell deal."

"I'll bet," said Blakeman, looking neither mad nor happy, but just sort of dead-pan, the way engineers so often do.

As we went out they were just beginning to get the snake going. We could hear them playing a flute. Actually I cannot recall any one hundred per cent successful recording of a "mystical" experience, as Artie called it, though I know Artie spent considerable money on it. He even went so far as to import some really top men from India and similar places, the best money could buy. Some of these fellows were called "fakirs," and whether they were actually "faking" or not I will leave it to you to be the judge.

"Well," I said to Tom Blakeman when we were out on the street, "is it as good as you expected?"

We found one on the corner in a cigar store. Blakeman put through a call to Fellowship to one of the rumpus rooms where the boys of his division were having a nice get-together following golf-bridge. It was semi-formal and the men were in their chairs. He spoke quickly to the fellow in Chair One.

"Round up the whole division down to assistant brand level," he said. "If I can make the next plane I'll be back there by nine-thirty. We'll hold the meeting then."

And I hardly need to add, either, that Con Chem was on its way to making real Business History.

Well, I guess you might say that is the end of the six days that I mentioned at the beginning of the memo, the six days which surely changed my life, and no doubt yours also.

All I am going to cover now is that last Thursday, just a few days more than a year later, which is without any doubt the most frightful experience of my life. There are many of you who read this who have more than one gray hair on account of Black Thursday, as we now refer to it.

What happened during the year after Tom Blakeman and I came back from St. Louis is history, and there are whole memo files and reels and reels of microfilm that any one of you can go into, if you are cleared to examine Con Chem classified material.

From the files of Legal Division you can go into all the details of the agreement made between Con Chem and Artie Decker and Jed Simmons, which gave us the exclusive license to manufacture and distribute the equipment.

I scarcely need to tell you that it made both of them, and especially Artie Decker, very rich men indeed, and of course good-sized stockholders in Con Chem.

And even to this day Jed Simmons is still running the Temple in St. Louis, though the new Code has naturally changed his "services" somewhat, and cut down the congregation to a considerable extent.

We didn't even forget Dan Packer, the fellow who thought up the gadget. He is assured of a very nice, though not huge, income, and he has a clause in his contract which says he gets a copy of every tape made.

I might add here that it was not long after the equipment was publicized that Variety, the show business newspaper, coined the term XP, which of course has now become a part of the English language, as much so as TV and Kodak.

If you will walk through the XP Museum in Engineering and Product Design at Katie you will see all our early production models, including our first Broadcast Receiver, designed to pick up the impulse over the air, as opposed to the direct wire system. And of course also the first Broadcast Transmitter.

You will get quite a laugh out of all these as they are certainly clumsy looking if placed alongside our latest models. I'm thinking especially of this year's De Luxe model receiver for women, the one with the rhinestones which looks like an expensive diamond tiara. And there are also several quite cute designs such as the Teen-Age Special made like a beanie cap with cute sayings on it like "Hi, Keed!" and "I'd like a hot tape of you, baby!"

But all this was before Black Thursday, which I am going to try to tell you about as calmly as I can, though I will confess that even to this day I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and get cold all over when I think about it.

It was not only the day of the big Indianapolis Decision, one of the basic decisions of the industry, but also of the now notorious Momsday Rebellion.

I can always remember the date because it happened on the last full working day, a Thursday of course, before Momsday itself. Normally you know yourselves how little work gets done on the last two days before the Momsday week end!

We planned to have an office party that afternoon, beginning about three, and you all know those Con Chem Momsday parties, I guess! And of course we were going to close at noon the following day, so that those people who were going to their home towns for the Momsday holidays could do so.

Well, the minute I walked into Katie that morning I had the feeling something awful had happened. I guess all of you know that feeling in an office, with people standing around and talking in low voices.

"Have you heard the news, Mr. Martin?" Miss Frappitt said to me before I even got into the bathroom in my office. Her face had a look of real calamity, and I mean a great deal more than Miss Frappitt's usual look of calamity, which is normal.

I ran right into Ben's meeting room. I can give you some idea of the frantic emergency nature of the meeting when I tell you that absolutely no formal ritual was being observed, and the order of chairs was all topsy-turvy.

I slumped down into a Chair Eight myself, and I hadn't been in an Eight in Ben's office for years. Everyone was talking at once, something that never happens. I might add that it is frantic, mad experiences like this that show us all the value of the formal meeting and the carefully considered approach.

"Quiet, quiet!" Ben was shouting. For a moment there was quiet, or I might almost say a shocked silence. No one had ever shouted like that in a Con Chem meeting, not within my experience. Yet it was necessary at the time, and I do not criticize Ben for doing it.

"It's true," Ben said. "XP has been canceled. It was a top-level decision. The production line in the plant was stopped at midnight last night. All dealers in Indianapolis have been notified to sell no more sets."

I scarcely need to add at this point that XP was begun on an experimental broadcast basis in Indianapolis only, using it as a test market city. Technically we had solved just about all the basic problems in Indianapolis. We were broadcasting on a UHF frequency, with an elementary Bi-X or bisexual beam, so that you could tune to either a male or a female viewpoint. Needless to say there was no pornographic material, but we did have some love-story type programs with a fair amount of kissing and all that.

"I don't understand that," I said, in a voice that I'm afraid was far too emotional for a meeting. But XP was practically my "baby" and I knew what the sales figures on it were. I said, "The last figures from the distributors show that XP is selling. If you project the figures even district-wise it would amount to more than five hundred million a quarter in sets alone."

"Management was looking at the bigger picture," Ben said. "There's no question that XP sets are selling well. However, TV sets are off drastically, including our own brands, and the sale of cars in the Indianapolis district slumped more than fifty per cent. Just to give you an idea, we get statements like this in the depth interviews: 'So why buy a new car? On XP I can drive the snazziest cars made for the cost of burning a light bulb.' What happens to our Con Chem auto parts subcontractors, our car upholstery mills, and all?

"This attitude covers everything. Food. The sale of cheap basic soybean mix and vitamin supplements is up, and fancy mixes are down. They're swallowing essentials and doing their fancy eating on XP. Profits are all shot. Actually, gentlemen, almost all business except the sale of XP sets in Indianapolis is going to pieces. In Indianapolis we're showing a net loss!"

"I don't think it's going to be that easy, Ben," I said. "You can't just take it away from them. You'll have riots."

"For right now we're going to keep up XP-casting from our station. The most enthusiastic XP fans will be the ones who now have sets, and this should keep them pacified for the time being."

Ben's secretary, Regina, ran in. You might say, since it was Regina, that she was in a pretty confusion. It will show you that the situation was practically a chaos, as Regina would never have come personally into an actual meeting room in normal times. I'm sure this fact wasn't lost on the fellows present.

"Mr. Burry," she said, without so much as a Happy Momsday, "I have Mr. Thrash's secretary on the Vid."

There was a respectful silence. Jud Thrash was Chairman of the Board of Thrash, Simple, and Mannick, the advertising agency that had been appointed to spearhead our XP drive. All of us knew then—as we know today—how fortunate we were to have persuaded T, S, and M to take the account, as they had a huge waiting list, and could not handle competing products. Since nothing could compete with XP, T, S, and M had had the Vision to see the real potential.

"Mr. Thrash's secretary says that Mr. Thrash is in the air now and should be on our roof immediately. She said it was too important for the Vid. He wants to stand on the ground."

Regina left, and it was only a matter of seconds before we heard the roar of powerful engines. Through the window we could see Thrash's sleek Jaguar-Vickers convertible sailing down, the sun shining on his great shock of white hair. It is a moment that I will always remember, and I think I can speak for all the others who were present. A few turns of the rotor blades and Thrash was out of sight, plumping onto our roof.

Not ninety seconds later Thrash himself burst into the meeting room, a striking person indeed, six feet seven, with a bronzed face, a gleaming smile, bright yellow shirt and a heavy, slubby tweed suit. There was not a man among us who did not know that Jud Thrash made at least ten million a year.

He strode to the conference table and leaped upon it. He squatted on top in the position of a football coach. All of us knew that he had been a football coach once.

"Fellows," said Jud Thrash, somehow looking us all in the eye at the same time, "I have come here myself in order to save you from yourselves."

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a wheel, an ordinary wheel that might have come from a child's tiny wagon. This, I thought at the time, was so typical of Jud Thrash, who was always so simple, so basic, and so sincere. In fact I guess just "human" is the best way to describe him.

"What have I here? A wheel from my little lad's toy wagon." I was personally aware that both Thrash's boys were in Dartmouth, but the point was not lost. "And why did I bring it? To show you that this, this wheel, was the first step on the ladder that we have climbed. Suppose, when that man of old, so long ago, made the first wheel, his friends had said, 'Destroy it! It will change our lives!' For change them it would! Where would we be today?"

He put the wheel back very slowly into his pocket, then raised his hand to his chin in the pose known to us all as The Thinker. Jud Thrash I guess is the greatest Thinker I have ever come in contact with, and I'm sure many of you can say the same. Of course he has to be, since he works in a business where thinking is all-important.

"Men," he said slowly, "you have kindled a little light in the darkness. Don't put it out!"

"I know what your market research has discovered. Would you be surprised to learn that our own research—and we have the largest research department in the agency business, paid for entirely out of our own pockets—would you be surprised to learn that our own research indicated as early as five weeks ago that this trend was beginning?"

We looked at each other. I don't think a man of us was sorry that T, S, and M was spearheading the drive.

"And why didn't we alert you? Fellows, we didn't want to come to you until we had licked it! We've been noodling this around, and now we've got it buttoned up, and buttoned up tight!"

He stopped. For a long moment there was silence. Then Ben said, "Tell us about it, Jud."

Jud clapped his hands and a young man who must have been in last year's class at the Harvard Business School and who was probably in the mail room at Thrash, Simple, and Mannick, walked in carrying a large watermelon. He took out a knife, handed it to Jud Thrash, turned on his heel and walked out, closing the door behind him.

We nodded. All of us knew, secretly, that the watermelon mixes had never really hit the nail on the head.

"Did the clerk tell you to eat half of it to see if it was good before you bought it? No, fellows, he did not!" Thrash plunged the knife into the melon and cut a triangular plug. He held it up and said very distinctly, one word at a time: "He—cut—a—plug!"

"Fellows, I have room for forty-three of you, and not one more, in our conference room this afternoon at three sharp. You will have to choose who can come and whom you will leave behind. Good day, gentlemen!"

He burst out through the door. Not three minutes later we heard his motors roaring and saw his Jaguar-Vickers spinning off our roof toward Garden City.

We were stunned, and yet I'll bet there was not a man in that room who didn't feel a great weight had been lifted off us. We had real faith in Jud Thrash, and I don't need to tell you now that our faith was certainly justified.

But just to show how stunned I was, I walked out of the meeting room, down the hall, and into my office, without even realizing that Joe Sand's secretary was trying to ask me a question. Finally I "came to" and heard her.

"His wife was on the Vid. He left home at the usual time. Nobody has seen anything of him since."

And as all you friends of poor Joe's may remember, no trace of him was found all that morning, even though we looked everywhere and even contacted the police.

It was the first step in the Momsday Rebellion, though at the time, of course, we did not know it.

They got exactly forty-three of us into two of Con Chem's helicopter buses. Just to give you an idea how anxious we were all to go, I can state that not a man who was asked refused to make the trip, even though a Momsday office party was all set for that afternoon.

I guess every one of you has had the experience of coming down by air over the offices of Thrash, Simple, and Mannick. It is certainly an inspiring sight.

It takes up, as you know, a whole city block in Garden City and it reproduces a whole section of Williamsburg, practically. Some of the buildings are actually copied board for board, except that at T, S, and M it is all really aluminum, since they have the National Aluminum account. You would never know it, however, the whole place looks like about 1776 or so.

When you first see it you wonder how they can put 2,300 employees in those twenty or thirty colonial houses, some of which are only "Cobbler Shops" and things of that sort. The answer is that they do not, only the top account executives and the other top management are above ground. Below these are four floors which are the size of the entire block, the bottom of which is the parking garage. The other three floors, all of them completely underground and out of sight, are where most of the 2,300 people work. It certainly is a nice arrangement.

Well, as we came down, one of the very beautiful colonial mansions opened up flat to reveal the T, S, and M heliport, and of course the agency motto, written like it was printed in old eighteenth-century type with bumpy edges and blown up. It said: "Be Simple, Be Sincere." It is a thought all of us should always remember.

In bad weather the elevator could have taken us, helicopter and all, down into the lower floors. But since it was a nice day, we were met by a whole fleet of open carriages with horses, each one driven by a colored fellow in a George Washington type hat and silk knickers.

The carriages were very cleverly decorated with Momsday colors and the horses had on quite cute little lace bonnets to make them look like Whistler's Mother. Not that it was done humorously, it was all kept in quite good taste.

We drove along the pretty tree-shaded streets, passing the mansions of the Account-Group-Supervisors, and the many small shops, such as Ye Olde Bake Shoppe, which we all knew was actually the Television Time-Buying Department. The names were all written out on those nice little swinging wooden signs.

The receptionists and secretaries who "showed" out the windows were all dressed up very cutely as Martha Washingtons. Naturally there were Momsday decorations all over, but they were all done kind of "in period."

We all drove up in front of the largest mansion, which looked something like Monticello, only I guess more so. Jud Thrash was right there on the front porch waiting for us. He was very quiet and solemn. All he said to us was, "Follow me, fellows."

He led the way into his mansion. He didn't even stop at his office, which of course was on ground level, but went right down the beautiful winding stairway, extremely colonial except that of course it was really an escalator.

As we rounded the turn we could see the portrait of the late (and great, also, I should add) Bim Simple, the fellow who really put the word Simple into advertising, as well as into Thrash, Simple, and Mannick. In fact, he is now pretty well accepted as the father of modern world-wide advertising. People laughed when Bim Simple said that sound, hard-hitting TV commercials and good solid merchandising could take over the world, but we know who had the last laugh. Surely every schoolchild knows his famous motto: "There are no enemies, only customers, and the customer is always right." These very words are cut in marble under the statue in St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) Russia. It is a statue, as you all remember, of the young lady beside the open refrigerator. Simple's name is not on the inscription, however. Like in everything he did, Bim Simple never wanted personal credit. All he wanted was money.

At the bottom of the escalator we were in the big underground area, all very tastefully decorated in colonial style, and all air conditioned and indirectly lit.

We walked past the banks of copywriting machines, most of them busily clicking away, though a few were sitting quietly under their tweed covers. I need scarcely add how much more businesslike all agencies have become since the electronic copywriting machines replaced the live copywriters, who were always a disturbing influence. And of course the copy has been improved. Naturally this does not mean that any less real thinking is done. That is still done as it always was by the Account Executives. They simply get on a copy-requirements-dictaphone and say, for instance, "Now this isn't copy but what we wanta say is how damn wonderful and amazing this damn thing is." In other words, just the kind of thing they used to tell the live copywriters. You just put this dictaphone tape into the machine, set it for mental level (in fact a few notches below, just to be sure) and it comes out in short, punchy sentences, with plenty of personal references, like "to you" and "to me," and with all short words. The machine also gives it a quick electronic C-and-B survey for comprehension and believability. Of course these machines are more expensive than live copywriters, but they are sure worth it.

We had to laugh going past the Time Buying section where a Momsday party was beginning to get into full swing. Quite a lot of baskets of you-know-what had been delivered by the networks and stations and they were sure having a gay old time, with some of the fellows in funny Mom bonnets chasing the girls around the desks.

It was even a little wilder than Momsday parties back at Katie Division, but we were prepared for that. We knew that advertising attracted the more brilliant but more "devil-may-care" types of people.

Jud Thrash led the way into one of the big conference rooms. It was completely soundproof and all the walls were sound board, painted a light gray. The only Momsday decoration was that they changed the indirect lighting to a soft pink.

The whole room was filled with reclining XP chairs, each of them with a closed circuit XP headpiece. They were all made by Con Chem.

The moment we sat down the doors opened and twelve young men probably from Harvard Business School came in and adjusted our headpieces.

Something happened just then which I could not explain at the time. The other young men went out, but one of them stayed behind for maybe a half minute. He was a sort of owlish-looking fellow with very thick glasses and stringy hair, though otherwise he was dressed in a gray Cashlon suit like the others. He had a piece of paper in his hand, like a list, and he seemed to be checking off the names of the Con Chem people.

The young fellow looked frightened, but stood his ground for quite a few seconds more, checking items off on the paper.

Little did we know then that this young fellow, like many others at both Con Chem and T, S, and M, was part of the Momsday Rebellion which was already closing in around us. And we didn't know, either, that every man in that room was even then on the "roundup" list.

"I'm not going to speak to you," said Jud Thrash, standing up in front of the room. "All of you know that with XP plain words are out of date. We're going to show you the problem, and we're going to show you our solution. If you're ready, we'll roll tape."

The lights dimmed and suddenly, by the magic of XP I was in an airliner, and so was everybody else in the room, in fact all in the same seat. I could hear the whoosh of the jets, feel us going down, and could look out and see an airport. It was Indianapolis.

There was a quick dissolve and I was riding in a car through the streets. We stopped at one of Con Chem's biggest appliance stores and I walked in. I couldn't help noticing I was wearing Scotch-grain-wing-tip shoes. Another dissolve and I was a salesman telling a customer about one of our XP sets. He must have been a real customer, not an actor, because he kept looking up just over my head, no doubt at the XP recorder headpiece the actor was wearing.

I told him $2,500 and he pulled it right out. He told me to send the set right home, and bought four extra receiving headpieces.

A voice broke in, the first "voice over" on this tape. "In Indianapolis," it said, "XP was selling well."

The tape dissolved again and I was standing in an automobile showroom, all alone. People were passing the windows but no one even looked in.

I was a checker in a supermarket. The lady in front of me had a big ten-pound box of the cheapest soy protein and a half-gallon jug of vitamin concentrate in her basket. As I rang up her bill, she turned to the lady in back of her and said, "Did you see what they're broadcasting for dinner tonight? Seventeen courses! I can hardly wait!"

The voice said, "Not groceries. In Indianapolis dollar sales in food markets were off fifty-three per cent."

I was in a helicopter coming down over Thrash, Simple, and Mannick. "Already," the voice said, "wheels were turning at T, S, and M. The threat—was being met!"

A swirling montage took me through department after department at T, S, and M. Men were thinking, preparing charts, dictating, conferring. For a split second I was thinking myself, and sliding a slide rule. I was an engineer in T, S, and M's brand new XP studio, turning the dials. A soggy cup of coffee was in front of me. I felt, for those few seconds, dog tired. I must have been working 'round the clock.

Suddenly I was in a home, an Average Home, the All-American Home we used in many of our TV commercials. It was all done in very good taste, but not too expensive.

I finished my blueberry pie, made from Con Chem's Py-Micks, patted my little freckled-face son on the head, winked to my pretty wife (who winked back, but a very good, clean, wholesome wink) and strolled from the dining alcove into the living room, whistling "I Wanna Gal Like You to be a Mommy to Me," which all of you may remember as the top hit of the day. Needless to say, the freckled-faced boy and the pretty wife were not related in any way, but were the best in the business.

I sat down at the XP chair and hooked myself up. I could see by the clock that it was exactly seven-thirty. Sure enough, as I tuned in a new show was just starting. It opened up by bouncing me on a trampoline in a somersault. I stopped motionless in mid-air as a voice said, in rising inflection, along with a fanfare—"It's the Chokky Puddy Hour with that King of Mirth and Madness—Louis Blooie!"

I came down on the trampoline and was face to face with laughing, lovable Louie Blooie, a TV star known to us all I am sure. Magically I was holding a seltzer bottle and gave it to him, right between the eyes. He let out with a big splutter, and it was certainly a witty sight all right. I could feel myself shaking all over with laughter. As I have always said, there is nothing like a good, clean laugh, and in fact a good strong sense of humor should be a part of every Con Chem man.

I bounced off the trampoline right through a big paper hoop, which was painted like the front of a package of Chokky Puddy, our best selling Con Chem pudding mix. I sailed right into a setting all fixed up like a dining alcove and right in front of me was a great big dish of Chokky Puddy with Mint-Whip-Mix on top, and a cherry on top of that. I had a spoon in my hand, all ready to dive in.

"Ah, ah, wait now," a voice said. "That is Chokky Puddy!" I reached out with my other hand and took hold of the bright red, blue, and green package with the puddy on the front. Then I looked back to the big, full dish. "Just see how luscious it looks," the voice said. "Not yet, not yet!" I pulled back my spoon. "First just smell that rich chocolate-like aroma!" I smelled it, and it was certainly chocolate-like, even more so than many mixes that contained actual chocolate. I put my spoon into it. "Notice that smooth, creamy texture!" I raised the spoon almost to my lips and held it there a couple of inches away. "Just imagine taking that big, delicious spoonful into your mouth!" I could feel that my mouth was really watering. "Well, go right ahead!" the voice said.

I put the spoon in and let the really swell-tasting pudding fill my mouth. The saliva was certainly coming out.

It lasted three seconds, and then—bang! My mouth was absolutely empty, except that I was sure drooling, and I mean actually. "Ummmmmm-yummmmm, wasn't that gooo-oood?" the voice said. "Why not make yourself a big yummy dish, right now?"

I will bet there were not many fellows in that room who didn't want to do that very thing.

I—and by that I mean the fellow in that average house—reached up and switched the headset. Needless to say, at that time there was only one XP channel even in Indianapolis, but of course this was a demonstration of the wonders of the Future.

It snapped to a new program, this time a musical. I was dancing with a lovely girl, but not too close to her. We danced over in front of the orchestra, which was of course none other than Guy Shortly's, the most expensive band in America in that year.

I beckoned to Guy and he practically snapped to attention. I told him in quite a fine rich voice to play "I Wanna Gal Like You to be a Mommy to Me." The girl squeezed me slightly at this, but in a nice way, you understand, it was all in very good taste. Guy kind of saluted and right away started playing the song.

There was a tricky orchestration and it kind of sashayed into the Voltmobile singing jingle. While it did I got kind of "wiped," you might say, out of the girl's arms and into the drivers seat of a brand new Voltmobile. I stepped on the accelerator and took off like a shot, while a voice told me what a swell car the Voltmobile was. I had to admit it was very easy to handle and had a swell feel.

But before I even stopped accelerating—bang!—the tape did a quick cut and I was standing at the curb. "Don't just stand at the curb," the voice said. Before it finished saying "curb," a beautiful and kind of snooty gal in a V-M convertible roared past me, not even giving me a look. The wheels hit a puddle and water sloshed all over me.

"——drive a Voltmobile—yourself!" the voice said. I guessed that after awhile the irritation of it could be quite effective, if repeated often enough.

The tape did another quick flip-flop and I was standing in a bathroom with a terrible double-volume itch in my nose. Just as I let out with a big double "Ca-chooooo!" the voice said, "Catching cold?" I got the itching feeling again, only more so and sneezed another beauty. "Don't have the discomfort of colds! Get Con-Drops!" the voice said.

I tilted back my nose and dropped in a whole medicine dropper full of Con-Drops. It certainly made a difference.

Including the sneezes I'll bet the whole thing took less than twenty seconds. It was, I found out later, a chain break spot.

Right after that I had a quick mouthful of beer, and as you will probably guess, the tape cut out as soon as my tongue was wet. It sure did make me thirsty for a glass of beer!

Then there was another dissolve and I was sitting alone in Jud Thrash's office, which as most of you know is a replica of the inside of Constitution Hall. Even though there was enough room in the office for five hundred people, we were sitting very close together, in fact Judd had his hand on my knee. I do not need to add that by the magic of XP this put his hand on everybody else's knee also.

"You have seen," he said almost in a whisper, "the beginning of a new era. We are going to make XP work for us, not against us. We have developed, and you have just experienced, the Principle of Limited Titillation.

"XP can create the urge to buy. I will go farther. XP will create an obsession to buy. Compared with it, TV is a child's toy.

"We have not scratched the surface, but we are learning, and we want you to learn with us how this great new medium can pull for us. These first early efforts were based on judgment alone—wait until our survey boys get on it!

"Use XP—but use it not as an end in itself. Use it to create the demand! Establish a Code, too. Remember, sex is a powerful selling tool—but not after it is satisfied! Let the boy and girl in the love story kiss—but only for five seconds, and with the lips closed. Make some mighty strict rules about where the bodies can touch—never below the waist, for instance. Keep it clean, keep it punchy—and make it sell! And never satisfy a demand.

"Let our watchword be: Titillate! Titillate, and titillate again—and the future will be ours!"

The tape was over and we were sitting in the conference room at T, S, and M. We were a little groggy, as you always are after an XP session, but in spite of that we stood up as a man and began clapping. It was quite spontaneous.

Jud Thrash was standing at the front of the room, this time in the flesh of course, with a look of great humility. This is what I guess you can expect from a man who is so basic, and so human.

"Thank you, fellows, thank you," he said. "You have made all our work . . . worth while."

Ben Burry raised his hand in a gesture that I guess you could call defiance and shouted, "I say full steam ahead on XP!" And since as you all know Ben Burry can take six months of careful thinking to make up his mind, you have an idea of the power of the whole thing.

Everyone joined in, including me, of course. You might say that at this moment the New XP was born, and I am sure the rest is certainly History.

It was not long after that we filed out, cheerful and confident, and wishing a Happy Momsday to all.

Little did we realize as we helicoptered back to Katie Division that the Momsday Rebellion was all ready to strike, and in fact, that every person on board the plane was already on the list of victims.

Since, of course, I was one of them, I will give you an eyewitness account of my part in it, just as it happened. I think it will help all of you to realize what we went through to give XP to the world.

It has been described since in the histories as The Momsday Rebellion, though it really took place on that Thursday night, which was two full days ahead of Momsday, which is always on a Sunday as we all know.

We should have suspected that something was up on account of Joe Sand's disappearance. In fact when I reached my office I knew something was wrong because Joe's secretary was still cold sober, a thing which is unusual late in the afternoon of the Momsday party. She was frantic, and rushed up to me among others.

Even in a crisis like this I could not help smiling just slightly at this remark since it was no secret around Fellowship that the Sands were not exactly billing and cooing as the expression goes, and in fact Mabel Sand was thinking of going out to Las Vegas.

"She's simply frantic," Joe's girl kept saying. "We've been calling the police and they're sending out alarms all over Long Island and to the New York City police."

Just then a secretary with a disposable cup full of Scotch hopped by on one foot, followed by a fellow from Statistics whose face was familiar. He was likewise hopping on one foot and trying to keep his Scotch from splashing out, too.

In fact the holiday atmosphere was everywhere. A considerable quantity of "loot" as we called it had arrived in the form of big baskets of liquor from our business friends, and I can honestly say that it was being put to use in the way it was intended.

I stopped by the Bull Pen of Charts and Graphs and had a large cup of bourbon "forced on me" as we say. It was very good bourbon, also.

On the way back to my office I stopped by several groups who were singing, one of which was doing some quite fine harmony on "Mother Machree." I held down the baritone spot for several choruses and then drifted by Tabulating and Checking, where they "twisted my arm" again to the tune of another shot, which was rye this time.

I was feeling extremely friendly, one reason why I say that office parties of this sort around Momsday and Christmas are a real plus. I know there are people who criticize them, but I feel that what we gain in fellowship and good feeling and a general get-together quality, more than balances off a few hours of working and meeting time, and an occasional broken memo-tape machine or a caved-in partition or two, things which do sometimes happen.

After the second cup I got to wondering what happened to Regina, Ben Burry's secretary, for in past years we had once or twice tossed off a cup of good cheer or two, and had a little innocent "hand holding." Let us face it, these times are valuable for cementing relations and for making personal contacts that often last the whole year through.

I was late, however, though I had to laugh at what happened. I passed old B. S. Staunch's office and who was on his couch but old B. S. himself and Regina, both of them passed out as cold as mackerels. I should add that they were both in sitting, not reclining positions. The only things reclining were two cups of whisky which were reclining on the floor and making quite a big spot.

I decided I had better get home and went to get my things out of my office. There, believe it or not, was my Miss Frappitt, dancing the waltz with one of the mail boys who was whistling, as no other waltz was playing at the time. He was very deeply fried or I think he would have picked almost anybody except Miss Frappitt.

I sneaked out of there as fast as I could. I have learned in the past that on these occasions Miss Frappitt thinks she ought to be "a Mom to me," and though I am in favor of the sentiment there is something about Miss Frappitt being a Mom to you which destroys some of the beauty of the whole Momsday idea.

By this time I have to admit I had almost forgotten about Joe Sand, though actually there was nothing I could do, since the police had all the facts.

I went out to the parking lot and on the way managed to pick up one more cup, this time Scotch. I didn't drink it all, but left it on somebody's filing cabinet, since I was going to have to drive.

I climbed into the Buick and pulled out of the lot, singing "Mother Machree" in what seemed to me, at the time at least, to be a very nice baritone.

Even before I was outside the Katie Division grounds, a fellow reeled out of the shrubbery with half a bottle of Scotch in his hand. I just barely had time to stop to keep from running over him.

He was dressed in a Cashlon flannel suit with a button-down collar. In fact, he looked in every way just like one of the fellows at Katie, though I did not recognize him.

"The same to you," I told him. He seemed like quite a nice type, though of course drunk at the moment, and was wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a black knit tie.

I figured he probably had his car in the lot, but as he was in no condition to drive, I decided I would keep in the Momsday spirit and give him a ride home.

"Sure, hop in," I said, and pushed the floor button with my foot, the one that on this model Buick opens the door.

He got in and started to sing, "M is for the million things you gave me——" and offered me a drink of Scotch, out of the bottle.

"No, thanks," I said, "I've had about five already." This was not strictly true, but I thought it would serve the purpose. I did however join with him in the singing. He had quite a fair tenor and I almost wished we could pick up another guy who was a bass.

I looked at him quite startled, as he had spoken in a sharp clear voice, not the least intoxicated. He still had the Scotch bottle in his left hand, but in his right was an automatic pistol, a small, probably .32 caliber, one.

"I'm not exactly used to this sort of thing," he said, "but I have to warn you that if you do anything suspicious or touch that phone I'll have to shoot you. I can't shoot very straight, but at this range I couldn't possibly miss you. At least I don't think I could."

"Look," I said, "if you want money, or even if you want the car, I'm insured. I only have a few thousand with me, but you're welcome to it."

"All we want is you," he said. "Sounds like a lyric, doesn't it? All we want is you, baby. And we really want nothing from you. In fact you might say we want to give you nothing." He laughed to himself. "That's about it, nothing."

I felt pretty sure then that he was a mental case. One thing worried me. "How did you know my name?" I said.

We were heading east, out toward the end of Long Island. The traffic was getting thinner and we were rolling along rapidly, more than a hundred on the straight stretches. We went across the Smithtown Overpass and on beyond Lake Ronkonkoma. From there it was pretty open country. We turned out onto the old Horse Block Road and kept going past the flat lands and the little scrub trees. Out there on mid-island you'd almost think you were on a desert.

I turned onto a little road that was scarcely more than a pair of ruts. I could hear the Buick, which was quite low slung, actually touching the raised strip in the middle of the road.

Ahead I could see dust which hadn't yet settled, as though a car had been right ahead of us. And in the rear-vision mirror I saw another car turn into the little road and follow us.

"He's coming, too. They're all coming," he said. "If you don't mind, I think I'll really take a drink. I'm not used to this, you know." He drank out of the bottle. "Have one?" he asked. "I'd advise it, really."

As we came around a slight bend I saw dozens of cars, all of them nice new ones, including some that were very fancy. There was Jud Thrash's Jaguar-Vickers convertible, with the rotos locked in roadable position. But the one I noticed especially was Joe Sand's. This is where Joe had been.

The cars were parked all around an old barn. On beyond was a farm house, where I guessed nobody had lived for maybe a hundred years. There wasn't even any glass in the windows and the paint was completely gone.

I guessed almost everybody was already in the barn. A fellow who was also dressed quite nicely was acting like a parking lot attendant. He motioned us into a spot. What he was motioning with, though, was a .45 automatic.

"I'll have to ask you to be quiet," said the fellow who was with Ben. He was wearing quite a decent-looking tweed suit, and he had a revolver. It looked like a police .38.

We walked on toward the barn. As I went in the big door I saw a short, rather nice-looking woman wearing a Newlon-mink jacket, and cradling a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun in her arms.

"Why, hello," I said. It was Mrs. Schroeder, the person who practically introduced me to XP.

"Hello, Mr. Martin," she said. "You know this might not have happened if you'd played ball with me a year ago."

"No, he's back in St. Louis. He's trying to finish his book. I don't think he'd be much good at this strong-arm sort of thing."

"Give him my regards," I said, and then I had to go along because the fellow with me was poking me in the back with his automatic. Not hard, I have to admit, in fact rather politely.

He led me into the main part of the barn. Nothing had been done to it except that a few big bare light tubes were strung up. The floor was packed earth and the walls were just the old bare boards.

But the whole place was filled with portable XP re-cling chairs. They were almost all full, and as far as I could tell the people in them seemed to be about the same ones who had been in the big meeting out at T, S, and M. In fact, as far as I could make out, it seemed to be the whole XP "team" from both Con Chem and the agency. And every single guy there was strapped to his chair so tight that he could just barely move.

And all around the sides of the room were people with rifles or shotguns or pistols in their hands. One of them, I noticed, was the owlish-looking young man who had been in the conference room at T, S, and M.

I think at any other time we would all have been much more scared, but as it was we had all had a few drinks. As a matter of fact, several groups of our fellows were singing "Mother Machree," and various other Momsday carols.

We just waited. Other fellows came in the door and were strapped down in chairs, too.

Two of them grabbed him, and somebody hit him on the head with, of all things, a book. A written-book, too, I believe.

"You should all be careful," said one of the guards. "We're amateurs at violence, and we might become excited and shoot. What is worse, we might shoot you in a clumsy way. You'd really be much safer with criminals."

After another wait I guess they figured everybody was there. One of the fellows, in fact I think the same one who made the little speech about clumsy shooting, got up on an old vegetable crate at the front of the room. He had on kind of a pin-striped suit and thick glasses. He was short, and getting bald. He seemed quite embarrassed about the whole thing, and as I look back on it, he certainly should have been.

"Really," he said, "I think I should apologize to you all for bringing you out here, and for what we're going to have to do to you. It's nothing personal. I know you're all nice fellows, I've worked with some of you and I know you have wives and children, just the way most of us do.

"That's why we're trying to do this as painlessly as possible. We believe that the end does not justify any means."

A voice yelled out from the side of the room, "It's still not too late to call it off, Freddie."

"I'm afraid it is," said the man on the vegetable box, whose name must have been Freddie. "We debated whether we should do this to any human beings and we've decided, reluctantly—yes.

"You see, we feel we've come to a fork in the road. Even before XP came along we'd begun to drive ourselves step by step down the path of mediocrity. Survey by survey we were finding out more and more surely what the lowest common denominator was in motion pictures, television, comic books—everything.

"We were giving it to them, and making it just a little lower for good measure. Notch by notch the mental level was dropping, thinking was decreasing, self-expression dying out. Year by year we've become more passive, our concentration duller, our minds flabbier. The individual is dying, the mass is rising. And freedom of thought is going, not by force but by default."

Needless to say, by this time I had little doubt we were in the hands of really dangerous crackpots, and of course it proved to be the case as history shows.

"Perhaps I shouldn't tell any of you this," Freddie went on, "since of course none of you will carry my words out of this room. But we ourselves need the words, to justify ourselves."

This I guess scared us more than anything else, the fact that we would not carry his words out of the room. I learned later that one of the T, S, and M account executives passed out totally at this point.

A girl standing on the sidelines hollered out, "Freddie, Freddie, you promised!"

I managed to turn around enough to see that this was the girl I had met at the Schroeders' house in St. Louis, the one who often kept her breasts outside and carved the insides of rocks. Only this time she didn't have her breasts outside, only about half out, no doubt as we were not all personal friends. She also had a twenty-two rifle.

"Now that isn't fair. We've been rehearsing for weeks—and it doesn't take any sets, Freddie, it's a symbolic dance combined with a recitative from our Greek Chorus, to the music of a discordant guitar. Billy, are you all tuned?"

"The point is, Letty," said a fellow in a white Cashlon turtleneck sweater, "that it is not tuned, that's the whole point." He was waving a guitar in one hand and a sawed-off shotgun in the other.

"Freddie, it will help us all. I do the solo dance. I'm a symbol representing a clam." She put her elbows out front with her arms kind of crooked and moved one up and the other down like two clam shells. I had to admit to myself it was very clamlike and quite clever.

"You see, Freddie," she said, making clam-type movements, "I represent the human race with XP, just lying there like a happy clam—only of course they're not really happy, they're——"

"Letty," he broke in, "we all want to see it, but let's wait for one of our regular meetings, if we all get out of this."

"Oh, Freddie!" Letty said, and stopped making clam movements altogether. She seemed quite angry.

"To go on," said Freddie, "we realized that the whole process would be accelerated by this new XP, and when we discovered that you people had found a way to make it work commercially, well, we couldn't delay any longer."

A fellow on the sidelines hollered out, "Call a spade a spade, Freddie! It's the system!" He was a wild-eyed type fellow in a green tweed suit with practically no press in the trousers.

"Phil, we'll listen to you later," Freddie said, and then he went on talking to us. "We have our differences of opinion, and Phil thinks the trouble is the free enterprise system. He's kind of weak on his history. The totalitarians of one stripe or another have already proved it's even easier to make ourselves into a peck of clams with their systems, and what they'd do with XP I don't even want to think about.

"Anyhow, as I started to say, it's kind of ironic that you people sitting there seem to be in the process of destroying individuals in the name of individualism. Worries us a lot. Once you get people sitting there like clams, the first thing you know some bright guy is going to get out a clam rake. Maybe a local boy, maybe not.

"Well, we knew about your big meeting this afternoon, and we figured you finally had the tools you needed. Maybe it's too late to stop you, maybe nothing can stop you——"

I heard a big gasp come up from all our people. I looked up and gasped, too. It was Joe Sand, tall, skinny Joe Sand, who usually had such a sorry expression.

Joe didn't even look at the fellow who called his name. He just sneezed three times and then stood there looking at the lights. It was very strange. He looked like a guy who's sorry, but who forgot what he's sorry for.

Somebody came and led Joe away, out back. They just led him like a baby. He didn't react one way or another, except to turn a little and point to the light and smile. And then he sneezed twice more and by that time they'd led him out.

"No," said Freddie, "he's not hurt, not really. We have good reason to believe it won't affect his IQ ultimately, though of course he hasn't a thing on his mind now. It is a frightful waste of education, but it may be a blessing to him, who knows?"

That was when I realized what they were going to do to us. They were going to erase our minds with XP.

"There's no point in waiting any longer," said Freddie. "I think we may as well turn on the current."

All of the other guys, even including the T, S, and M men joined in loud and strong:

I know I was thinking of my Mom, and St. Louis, and of my Buick, and even Miss Frappitt, but I sang along with them. It was a moment I think we will always be proud of.

I couldn't help thinking, too, as we sang, what a tragedy it was. Here we had found the way—to a fine, straight-thinking solution to all our problems. Here, opening up ahead of us was a world of busy factories, fine dividends, and happy, happy consumers, and all of it was about to be destroyed.

Everybody stiffened, at least I know I did. It was a tape of one of the commercials we had seen that very afternoon, the one about Con-Drops, for colds. I sneezed, and I sneezed again, standing there in that same bathroom. I don't mean I actually sneezed, I did it on XP, you understand.

And then when we got to the place where the good part was supposed to come, when you put in the Con-Drops and got instant relief, well then I realized what they had done.

The sneeze part came on again. They had made a loop out of the tape, just the sneeze part. On the second time around the volume was about doubled. I grabbed the arms of the chair and sneezed. They ran the loop at double for maybe ten times and then tripled it.

It was getting so I couldn't think of anything but the strong tickling sensation in my nose and the sneeze which was beginning to feel that it was just tearing my head off. Maybe ten more times they played it at triple, and then they boosted it up again. My mind was beginning to focus on it hard now, I couldn't think of anything else at all.

Then I heard the sound of a siren, far off. At first I thought maybe that was part of the tape, too. Then I heard some shots outside the building and saw some of our kidnapers running out of the barn. All through this I was sneezing my head off on XP.

A tear gas shell lobbed into the barn and exploded up near where the vegetable box was. Freddie had already left it, though.

The tape stopped, which I guess was the biggest relief I ever had in my life. I sneezed several times, however, and not on XP. We could still not move out of the chairs.

Two or three more tear gas shells sailed in and burst. All of us were coughing and crying, but it was a whole lot better than sneezing at quadruple volume.

Some policemen in gas masks came in and started taking guns away from the kidnapers. There were a few shots but not very many. I don't think these people, though they were certainly crackpots, were exactly shooting types.

The girl named Letty fainted quite skillfully it seemed to me, right into the arms of one of the policemen. He seemed extremely embarrassed, as she had let her breasts fly out rather loosely.

Needless to say, we were happy to see the police, who were actually State Police, a half-dozen cars full of them. It came out later that one of their helicopters which was looking for Joe Sand spotted this set-up and all the cars. After they had alarm calls from quite a number of other people, including my own Mom who couldn't get in touch with me, they decided they'd better attack in force.

They unhooked us and we all went outside the barn. Our eyes were crying, but we certainly felt like laughing, all of us. The police were rounding up all the kidnapers and putting handcuffs on them. To this day most of them are in Sing Sing prison, a fate they richly deserve.

Wandering around like a lost soul was Joe Sand. I went right up to him and said, "Hello, Joe!" He just sneezed at me. He certainly did look sorry. And even worse, he didn't know anything, including the English language. I might add at this point, however, that Joe's mind was not actually hurt, but just erased. Joe and his family are on a Con Chem pension now. As many of you know, he went through grammar school in just one year and right now is enjoying the junior year of high school, and getting quite good grades. One happy fact is that Joe and Mabel were just about to be divorced before that fatal day, but now I have never seen a happier woman than Mabel. As she told me one day at Fellowship, "It kind of brought out the Mom in me!"

Well, to be brief, it was not long before I was sitting in my Buick again. First I phoned Mom to tell her I was all right, and then I settled back behind the wheel and drove out to the Horse Block Road. The sun was going down behind little pink clouds, and on the radio the NBC Chorus was singing the Momsday carols.

I joined right in, I was so happy. It seemed kind of that a whole new day was dawning for all of us.

And I hardly need to tell all of you Con Chem fellows that it has dawned, all right. In fact, now that commercial XP finally went nationwide last month, we can rightly say we are living in a whole new world, and one in which Con Chem is playing the most important part.

Certainly our test markets have proved we never have to worry about selling anything any more. We just set our quotas and fire away.

And so, as I close this memo, I would just like to remind all you young Con Chem men what all of us went through to bring about all these miracles of science. We have made Progress, and we look to all of you to carry the torch when we drop it and to go ahead, always ahead, to the Goal Line.

You may think that we are living in the best of all possible worlds, but it is up to you to make it more and more so.

Mr. Mead has unique qualifications for writing a book of this kind, since he is our only leading literary figure who is also vice president of a multimillion-dollar corporation.

Mead's life, however, has not been altogether a rosy one, in spite of his lovely wife, his three charming children, and his mansion on the North Shore of Long Island.

His troubles began almost as a child. His father was in the sign business and he was taught at an early age to obey signs. Since the day he learned to read he has kept off the grass, watched out for children, and not fed the animals.

The worst was yet to come. One day, years later, he was lolling about his suite of offices, when a friend dropped in and left a sign reading, "THINK." Mead tore it down quickly, but the damage had already been done. Unlike thousands of business men who have looked at this message for years with no ill effect, Mead actually began thinking.

The rest, of course, is history. Thinking led to sleeplessness and this to writing as a quiet and inexpensive way of filling the long hours before dawn.

Mead at first tried to combine writing and thinking, but found, as so many of our popular authors have, that the two do not mix. Books tumbled out in reckless, and thoughtless profusion: The Magnificent Maclnnes; Tessie, the Hound of Channel One; and finally, How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying, a book which has brought wealth and happiness to so many.

When asked if he had any message for todays' business leaders, Mead replied, without a moment's hesitation, or thought, that they would be far happier if they did not begin thinking. "In fact," he said, "if we can only go on without thinking, as we have in the past, the happy world outlined in my book may very well prove to be more than just a rosy dream."

the
BIG BALL
OF WAX

SHEPHERD MEAD

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